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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



Truth is like a Torch : The more it 's Shook, it Shines. 



BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF 

BACON vs. SHAKESPEARE 



EDWIN REED 

Author of "A New View of the Temperance Question" 



FIFTH EDITION, REVISED AND ENLARGED 




NEW-YORK 
PRINTED AT THE DE VINNE PRESS 
1892 

<»3 




t: ^ 



• \\ 



Copyrighted, 1890 and 1891, by Edwin Reed. 



TO 

2Dt)r H^onorable KictjarD Cutts; ^bannon 

ENVOY EXTRAORDINARY AND MINISTER PLENIPOTENTIARY 

OF THE 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

TO THE REPUBLICS OF 

NICARAGUA, SALVADOR, AND COSTA RICA 

THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED 

BY THE AUTHOR 



INTRODUCTORY. 



In the following Brief for the Plaintiff, Bacon 7'^. Shake- 
speare, in an action of ejectment, now on trial, it is intended 
to cite such facts only as are generally agreed upon by both 
parties or can be easily verified, and in the main to let 
those facts, trumpet-tongued, speak for themselves. Like 
the lines that mark the sea-coast on our maps, each sepa- 
rate proof shades off in a thousand fine corroborating cir- 
cumstances, which are often very interesting, as well as 
important for a full knowledge of the subject. Mr. Don- 
nelly's cipher is, for the present purpose at least, clearly 
beyond soundings. For further information, the reader is 
respectfully referred to the works of Deha Bacon, Mrs. 
Pott, Richard Grant White, Dr. Rolfe, Judge Holmes, 
Appleton Morgan, and last, but not least, Ignatius Don- 
nelly ; not to mention numerous others which the world, it 
is to be feared, will soon be too small to contain. 



PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION. 



We may say of improbabilities, as we do of evils, choose 
the least. 

It is antecedently improbable that the Shakespeare Plays, 
for which the whole domain of human knowledge was laid 
under contribution, were written by William Shakespeare, 
for he was uneducated. 

It is also antecedently improbable that Francis Bacon, 
whose name for nearly three hundred years has been 
a synonym for all that is philosophical and profound, 
who was so great in another and widely different field 
of labor that he gave a new direction for all future 
time to the course of human thought, was the author of 
them. 

And yet, to one or the other of these two men we must 
give our suffrage for the crowning honors of humanity. 

In the claim for Shakespeare, the improbability is so 
overwhelming that it involves very nearly a violation of the 



8 PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION. 

laws of nature. No man ever did, and, it is safe to say, 
no man ever can, acquire knowledge intuitively. One may 
be a genius like Burns, and the world be hushed to silence 
while he sings; but the injunction, "In the sweat of thy 
face shalt thou eat thy bread," is as true of intellectual 
as it is of physical life, everywhere. The fruit of the 
tree of knowledge can be reached only by hard climb- 
ing, the sole instance on record in which it was plucked 
and handed down to the waiting recipient having proved 
a failure. 

In the case of Bacon, however, the improbability is one 
of degree only. It is, in fact, not entirely without prece- 
dent. Fortune has more than once emptied a whole cor- 
nucopia of gifts at a single birth. What diversity, what 
beauty, what grandeur in the personality of Leonardo da 
Vinci ! He was author, painter, sculptor, architect, musi- 
cian, civil engineer, inventor — and in each capacity, almost 
without exception, eminent above his contemporaries. His 
great painting, the Last Supper, ranks the third among the 
products in this branch of modern art, Raphael's Madonna 
di San Sisto and Michael Angelo's Last Judgment being 
respectively, perhaps, first and second. At the same time, 
he was the pioneer in the study of the anatomy and struct- 
ural classification of plants; he founded the science of 
hydraulics ; he invented the camera obscura ; he proclaimed 



PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION. 9 

the undulatory theory of light and heat ; he investigated the 
properties of steam, and anticipated by four centuries its 
use in the propulsion of boats ; and he barely missed the 
great discovery which immortalized Newton. Indeed, we 
see in Leonardo da Vinci, not a mountain only, but a 
whole range of sky-piercing peaks ! 

Another illustrious example is Goethe, scarcely inferior 
to Bacon, whatever the claims made for the latter, in the 
briUiancy and scope of his powers. As a poet, Goethe was 
a star of the first magnitude, a blaze of light in the literary 
heavens. His Faust is one of the six great epic poems 
of the world. As a writer of prose fiction he stands in 
the front rank, his " Wilhelm Meister " a classic side by 
side with " Ivanhoe," " Middlemarch," and " The Scarlet 
Letter." By a singular coincidence, also, as compared with 
Bacon, he was one of the master spirits of his age in the 
sphere of the sciences. An evolutionist before Darwin, he 
beheld, as in a vision, what is now becoming clear, the 
application of law to all the phenomena of nature and life. 
In botany, he made notable additions to the then existing 
stock of knowledge ; and throughout the vast realm of biol- 
ogy he not only developed new methods of inquiry, but 
he spread over it the glow of imagination, without which 
the path of discovery is always doubly difficult to tread. 
In the light of precedents, therefore, the claim made in 



lO PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION. 

behalf of Bacon to the authorship of the Plays cannot be 
discredited. 

The reader is now asked to measure the relative improba- 
bilities in question for himself. 

E. R. 

Andover, Mass., September i, 1890. 



PREFACE TO FOURTH EDITION. 



Nothing is more tenacious of life than an old popular 
belief. It has the force of habit which the pressure of 
enhghtened opinion through successive generations alone 
can overcome. " O Lord, thou hast taught us," once 
prayed a good deacon, " that as the twig is bent, the tree's 
inclined " — a truth drawn from the Book of Nature, and as 
indubitable as though the \\Titings of Pope were a part of 
the sacred canon. Trees that have unnatural and 
uncomely twists in their branches, even if growing on 
Mount Zion, must die of old age, or be cut down, before 
the errors of arboriculture will cease to torment us. In- 
telligent and conscientious scholars among us are still 
defending the historical accuracy of the first chapter of 
Genesis. A personal devil is almost as potent in the minds 
of men to-day as he was when Martin Luther hurled the ink- 
stand at his head. In Germany, how often one hears the 
polite ejaculation Gesund/ieit, uttered when a person sneezes ! 



12 PREFACE TO FOURTH EDITION. 

Who does not turn, almost instinctively, to see in which 
part of the heavens the moon quarters, for a forecast of the 
weather, though that luminary is as innocent of any inter- 
meddhng with that branch of our local affairs as is the 
most distant star which the Lick telescope has revealed to 
us ! 

And the worst of it is, these old beliefs linger in the noblest 
minds to the last. The shadow of a solar eclipse, sweep- 
ing over the earth, lets the just and the unjust, the wise 
and the foolish, emerge into the light behind it indiscrimi- 
nately. Evil spirits do not always beg the privilege, when 
they find themselves about to be exorcised, of taking refuge 
in a herd of swine and leaping over a precipice into the sea. 
The horrible butcheries of the Salem Witchcraft, marking 
the close of that delusion, were perpetrated by those to 
whom the love of God was the chief end of man. One of 
the last judges in England to send a witch to the gallows 
was Time's noblest offspring. Sir Matthew Hale. The last 
in that country to manumit their slaves were the clergy. 
The Garrison mob in Boston wore broadcloth on their backs 
and all the current virtues in their hearts. It is, therefore, 
no criterion of a good cause that men of acknowledged 
abilities and culture support it, nor of a bad cause that 
such men denounce it. 

Indeed, truth has a modest way of entering the world 



PREFACE TO FOURTH EDITION. 13 

like a mendicant, at the back door. Such a guest is sel- 
dom admitted, on his first arrival, at the other end of the 
house. Poor Copernicus stood there shivering in the cold 
thirteen years before he dared even to lift the knocker. 
Every great religion has sprung up among the poor. Every 
great reform owes its origin to the oppressed. Every great 
invention has had, like the founders of Rome, a wolf for 
a nurse. It is not to be expected that rebellion against a 
king of poets will find favor among the nobility that sur- 
round his throne. The high-priests who, with unsandaled 
feet, minister in a sacred temple will not be the first to 
despoil the idol they worship. No captain in that " fleet 
of traffickers and assiduous pearl-fishers " to which Carlyle, 
in the most eloquent sentence he ever wrote, refers, will 
strike his colors or change his outfit so long as the products 
of his industry under the old regime are bringing him 
wealth. And what to him are winds and waves, or any 
storm of criticism, whose barque is anchored to the 
theory of Inspiration ! Showers of verbal aerolites on the 
mimic stage, only a product of untaught Nature ! 

Amid the turmoil of our daily life, if we listen reverently, 
we may hear voices crying in the wilderness, perhaps the 
voice of a woman, alone and forsaken, in a strange city. 

" No accent of the Hol\' Ghost 
The heedless world hath ever lost." 



14 PREFACE TO FOURTH EDITION. 

From the banks of the Missouri, from the wheat-fields 
of Minnesota, from far-off Melbourne at the antipodes, 
out of the heart of humanity somewhere, a response in due 
time is sure to come. 

E. R. 

Andover, Mass., January i, 1891. 



IN THE TRIBUNAL OF HISTORY. 



Bacon \ 
vs. > Brief for Plaintiff. 

Shakespeare. ) 

I. 

The Author of the Shakespeare Plays. 

It is conceded by all that the author of the Shakespeare 
Plays was the greatest genius of his age, perhaps of any 
age, and, with nearly equal unanimity, that he was a man 
of profound and varied scholarship. 

I . He was a linguist, many of the Plays being based on 
Greek, Spanish, and Italian productions which had not then 
been translated into English. Latin and French were 
seemingly as famihar to him as a mother tongue. It is 
thus apparent that not less than five foreign languages, 
living and dead, were included in his repertory. 

Latin. — The Comedy of Errors was founded upon the JMencechnti 
of Plautus, a comic poet, who wrote about 200 B.C. The first 
translation of the Latin work into English, so far as known, 
was made in 1595, subsequently to the appearance of the Shake- 



1 6 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

speare play, and without any resemblance to it " in any peculiar- 
ity of language, of names,'or of any other matter, however slight." 
— Verplanck. 

"His frequent use of Latin derivatives in their radical sense 
shows a somewhat thoughtful and observant study of that lan- 
guage." — Richard Grant White. 

Greek. — Tiinon 0/ Athens was drawn partly from Plutarch and 
partly from Lucian, the latter author not having been translated 
into English earlier than 1638 (White), fifteen years after the pub- 
lication of the play. 

Helena's pathetic lament over a lost friendship in JSIidsummer- 
Nighfs Dreaju (III., 2) had its prototype in an untranslated Greek 
poem by St. Gregory of Nazianzus, published at Venice in 1504. 
— Gibbon s Decline and Fall, Chap, xxvii. 

Italian. — An Italian novel, written by Giraldi Cinthio and first 
printed in 1565, furnished the incidents for the story of Othello. 
The author of the play " read it probably in the original, for no 
English translation of his time is known." — Gervinus. 

"He was, without doubt, quite able to read Italian." — Richard 
Grant White. 

French. — One entire scene and parts of others in Henry V. are 
in French. 

Plowden'sFrench Commentaries, containing the celebrated case 
of Hales vs. Petit, which was satirized by the grave-diggers, were 
translated into English for the first time more than half a century 
after Hamlet was written. 

Spanish. — The poet drew some of his materials for the T%vo Gen- 
tlemen of Verona from the Spanish romance of Montemayor, en- 



BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. I 7 

titled the Diana, which was translated into English in 1582, the 
translation, however, not being printed till 1598. "The resem- 
blances are too minute to be accidental." (Halliwell-Phillipps.) 
As the play was produced previously to 1593, it follows that the 
author read either the translation in manuscript or the Spanish 
original. The latter supposition, particularly in view of his other 
linguistic acquirements, is more probable. 

An unknown play, based on the same story and played before 
the Queen in 1585, was doubtless the Two Gentlemen of Verona in 
an earlier form. 

The J\fercha)ti of Venice and Cymbeline were also indebted, not 
only for much of their respective plots, but, in some instances, for 
identical passages, to works not then in English dress. 

Gervinus, one of the ablest of the Shakespearean critics, calls 
attention to two of the Comedies in which Latin, French, Spanish, 
and Italian words and sentences abound, and ventures to suggest 
a desire, on the part of the author, to exhibit in them his knowledge 
of foreign langtiages. 

2. He had intimate acquaintance with ancient and 
modern hterature, numerous authors, from the age of Plato 
down to his own, being drawn upon for illustration and 
imagery in the composition of these works. 

" The writer was a classical scholar. Rowe found traces in him 
of the Electra of Sophocles ; Colman, of Ovid ; Pope, of Dares 
Phrygius and other Greek authors ; Farmer, of Horace and Virgil ; 
Malone, of Lucretius, Statins, Catullus, Seneca, Sophocles, and 



l8 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

Euripides ; Steevens, of Plautus ; Knight, of the Antigone oi Sopho- 
cles ; White, of the Alcestis of Euripides." — Nathaniel Holmes. 

" The early plays exhibit the poet not far removed from school 
and its pursuits ; in none of his later dramas does he plunge so 
deeply into the remembrances of antiquity, his head overflowing 
with its images, legends, and characters. The Taming of the Shrew, 
especially, may be compared with the First Part of Henry VI. ' in 
the manifold ostentation of book-learning.' " — Gervinits. 

Stapfer, a distinguished French critic, intimates that in his 
judgment, some of the plays are " over-cumbered with learning, 
not to say pedantic." * 

3. He was a jurist, with 

"a deep technical knowledge of the law," 

and an easy familiarity with 

"some of the most abstruse proceedings in English jurispru- 
dence." — Lord Chief ynstice Campbell. 

His fondness for legal phrases is remarkable, but it is 
still more remarkable that, 

" whenever he indulges this propensity, he unifonnly lays down 
good law." — Idevi. 



* It may be well to remark that Stapfer and White are unfriendly witnesses, 
and that Gervinus and Verplanck wrote before this controversy began. Judge 
Holmes is our senior counsel, but we claim the right at this hearing to put him 
also on the witness stand. His work on the A uthorship 0/ S/takes^eare I's as tem- 
perate in its judgments as it is philosophical and profound in general treatment 
of the subject. 



BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. I9 

One of the sonnets (46) is so intensely technical in its 
phraseology that, 

"without a considerable knowledge of English forensic procedure, 
it cannot be fully understood." — Idem. 

"Among these [legal terms], there are some which few but a 
lawyer would, and some even which none but a lawyer could, have 
written." — Franklin Fiske Heard. 

4. He was a philosopher. 

" In the constructing of Shakespeare's Dramas, there is an un- 
derstanding manifested equal to that in Bacon s A-'ovufu Or^-anum." 
— Carlyle. 

'' He is inconceivably wise; the others conceivably." — Emerson. 

" From his works maj' be collected a system of civil and eco- 
nomical prudence." — Dr. yohnson. 

" He was not only a great poet, but a great philosopher." — 
Co/en'dge. 

Thus was the author's mind not only a fountain of 
inspiration from its own illimitable depths, but enriched in 
large measure with the stores of knowledge which the 
world had then accumulated. 

" An amazing genius which could pervade all nature at a glance, 
and to whom nothing within the limits of the universe appeared 
to be unknown." — IVhallev. 



II. 

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



1 . The family of William Shakespeare was grossly illiter- 
ate. His father and mother made their signatures with a 
cross. His daughter Judith, also, at the age of twenty- 
seven, could not write her name. The little we know of 
his own youth and early manhood affords presumptive 
proof of the strongest kind that he was uneducated. 

" His learning was very little." — Thomas Fuller' s Worthies, 1662. 

" In him we find all arts and sciences, all moral and natural 
philosophy, without knowing that he ever studied them." — 
Dryden. 

2. The Shakespeare family had no settled or uniform 
method of spelhng their name. More than thirty different 
forms have been found among their papers, on their tomb- 
stones, and in contemporaneous public records. William 
wrote it Shaksperc ; his brother Gilbert, Shakespeir. In a 
mortgage deed given by the corporation of London, it is 
Shakspcr The indorsement on an indenture between 
Shakespeare and two of his neighbors in Stratford spells it 



BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. 21 

Shackspeare. Among other forms discovered in the records 
of the family are the following : Shaxpur, Chacksper, 
Schakespeire, Shagspere, Shakaspeare, Shaykspere, and 
Schakespayr. Patronymics often varied at that time, as 
they do now, in different families and in different sections 
of the country, but here the variations in the same house- 
hold were numerous and, apparently, at hap-hazard. 
Nevertheless, it is a singular circumstance, that in all the 
forms tabulated by Wise, nineteen hundred and six in 
number, the one appearing on the title-pages of the Plays 
and Poems, Shakespeare, is unique. No member of the 
family in any part of the kingdom wrote the name in that 
way. Literature had an absolute monopoly of it.* 

3. Shakespeare's handwriting, of which we have five 
specimens in his signatures to legal documents, was not 
only almost illegible, but singularly uncultivated and gro- 
tesque, wholly at variance with the description given of the 
manuscripts of the Plays in the preface to the foho edition 
of 1623. The editorial encomium was in these words : 

"His mind and hand went together; and what he thought, he 
uttered with that easiness, that we have scarce received from him 
a blot in his papers." 



*It is significant, also, that in some of the quartos first published the 
name appears with a hyphen, thus, Shakespeare^ as though to distinguish it 
in another slight respect from that of the actor. 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 



In this connection, we reproduce the five autographs of 
Shakespeare, the only acknowledged specimens of his pen- 
manship in existence, m facsimile: 

4. Shakespeare made no mention of any Uterary property 
in his will. He was careful to specify, among other 
bequests, his " second-best bed," but not a book, not a copy 
of one of his own books, not even a manuscript, though 
such immortal dramas as Macbeth, Tempest, and Julius 
Caesar were unpublished at the time of his death.* 

* Counsel on the other side attempt to meet this point by saj-ing that 
Shakespeare had sold his manuscripts to the theatre company before leaving 
London. They have so long assumed this to be true tiiat they novv state it 
unqualifiedly, though without proof. They should issue instructions, however, 
to the cicerone at Stratford, who informs visitors that the wicked manuscripts 
were destroyed, after Shakespeare's death, by his puritanical children ! 



BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. 



23 



5. No letter written by him has come down to us, and 
but two addressed to him, and those make no reference to 
hterature. An inspection of his autograph is alone suffi- 
cient to explain the paucity of his correspondence, if not 
its absolute non-existence. 

6. In the dedication of the Ve/ius and Adonis, pubhshed 
in 1 593, Shakespeare calls that poem the first heir of his 
invention. This makes it ante-date the Plays. Accord- 
ingly, Richard Grant White sets it down as written in 
1584-5, before Shakespeare left Stratford. Furnivall, 
also, assigns it to the same early date. 

The Venus and Adonis is a product of the highest cul- 
ture. It is prefixed with a Latin quotation from Ovid, and 
is written throughout in the purest, most elegant and 
scholarly English of that day. Hazlitt compares it to an 
ice-house, " almost as hard, as glittering, and as cold." Is 
it possible that in a town where seven only of the nineteen 
aldermen could write their names, where the habits of the 
people were so inconceivably filthy that John Shakespeare, 
father of William, was publicly prosecuted on two occa- 
sions for defiling the street in front of his house, where the 
common speech was a patois rude to the verge of barba- 
rism, and where, probably, outside of the schools and 
churches, not a half dozen books, as White admits, were 
to be found among the whole population, — is it possible 



24 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

that in such a town a lad of twenty composed this beauti- 
ful epic ? 

7. It is believed that Shakespeare left his home in Strat- 
ford and went to London some time between 1585 and 
1587. He was then twenty-one to twenty-three years of 
age. One of the first of the Shakespeare Plays to be pro- 
duced on the stage was Hamlet, and the date not later than 
1589. It was founded on 'a foreign tragedy of which no 
translation then existed in English. As first presented, it 
was probably in an imperfect form, having been subse- 
quently rewritten and enlarged into what is now, perhaps, 
the greatest individual work of genius the human mind has 
produced. To assume that Shakespeare, under the circum- 
stances in which he was then placed, at so early an age, 
fresh from a country town where there were few or no 
books, and from a family circle whose members could not 
read or write, was the author of this play, would seem to 
involve a miracle as great as that imputed to Joshua — in 
other words, a suspension of the laws of cause and effect.* 

* It has been suggested that the original Hamlet was by another author. 
This supposition, however, encounters an improbabilitj- of its own, not so 
great as the one mentioned in the text, but still fatal, viz. : that a playwright 
would adopt for the title of his masterpiece a name already familiar to the 
public, and identified in the same age with the same subject. No absurd 
hypothesis stands in Bacon's way, for he was nearly thirty years of age when 
Hamlet was first pla)'ed, had been highly educated at home and abroad, and 
was then a briefless barrister at Gray's Inn. 



BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. 25 

8. The end of his career was as remarkable as the begin- 
ning. His residence in London extended over a period of 
twenty-five years, during Avhich time, according to popular 
belief, he wrote thirty-seven dramas, one hundred and fifty- 
four sonnets, and two or three minor poems, besides accu- 
mulating a fortune the income of which has been estimated 
at £1,000 (equivalent in our time and in our money to 
$25,000) per annum. Such an instance of mental fecundity 
the world has never seen, before or since. 

In 1610 or thereabouts, while he was still comparatively 
young (at the age of forty-six), he retired from London 
and passed the remainder of his days among his old neigh- 
bors in Stratford, loaning money and brewing beer for sale. 
His intellectual life seems to have terminated as abruptly 
as it had begun. The most careful scrutiny fails to show 
that he took the slightest interest in the fate of the plays 
left behind him, or in his own reputation as the author of 
them. Some of these productions were still in manuscript, 
unknown even to the stage, and not given to the public, 
either for fame or profit, till thirteen years after his retire- 
ment. Such indifference to the' children of his brain and 
such utter seclusion in the prime of his manhood from the 
refinements of life present to us a picture, not only pain- 
ful to contemplate, but one that stultifies human nature 
itself. 



26 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

9. Our surprises do not cease at his death. On the heavy 
stone slab that marks his grave in the old church at Strat- 
ford, visitors read the following inscription : 

" Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear 
To dig the dust enclosed here : 
Blest be the man that spares these stones, 
And curst be he that moves my bones." 

These hnes are evidently his own, for the imprecation 
contained in them prevented his wife, who survived him, 
from being laid at rest by his side. 

10. So far as we know, Shakespeare never claimed the 
authorship of the Plays. He simply permitted his name 
to be used, doubtless for good and sufficient reasons, and 
in accordance with a not unusual custom at that period, on 
the title-pages of fotirteen of them printed in his life-time, 
though they all (thirty-seven in number) were ascribed to 
him unmistakably in the collected editions that appeared 
after his death. His reticence on the subject, especially 
after his retirement to Stratford, is itself a presumptive 
proof of his integrity and honor. His fellow-townsmen, it 
is probable, never witnessed one of his productions on the 
stage. Neither his local fame (if he had any) as a dram- 
atist, nor the influence of his wealth and position (if ex- 
erted by him) overcame their repugnance to theatrical rep- 
resentations, for in 1602 the board of aldermen prohibited 



BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. 27 

any performance of the kind in the town under a penalty 
of ten shilhngs. In 1612, when Shakespeare's reputation 
among his neighbors should have been at its zenith, the 
penalty was increased to ten pounds. The key to the situ- 
ation Hes in his stohdity, or in his sense of honor. 

1 1 . The references to Shakespeare, direct and indirect, 
in contemporaneous hterature (i 592-1616) have been care- 
fully collated and published. They number one hundred 
and twenty-five, and may be classified as follows : those 
made to him as a reputed author or to his works, one 
hundred and twenty ; those made to him as a man, five. 
The citations in the first class are, of course, irrelevant to 
otu: purpose. In the second, we find statements from the 
following named persons : Robert Greene and Henry 
Chettle, 1592; John Manningham, 1601 ; an anonymous 
writer, 1605; and Thomas Heywood, 1612. Greene de- 
nounces Shakespeare as an impostor ; Chettle disclaims the 
honor of a personal acquaintance with him ; Manningham 
makes him the hero of an amour ; the anonymous writer 
(after the manner of such writers) calls attention to his 
penurious habits, his chronic disregard of obligations, and 
his wealth ; and Heywood is indignant because two of his 
own poems had been published by a piratical printer as 
Shakespeare's, but (he affirms) without the latter's con- 
sent. 



28 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

Excepting Ben Jonson,* and apart from the official rec- 
ords of baptism, marriage and death, of transfers of prop- 
erty and suits at law, these obscure writers tell us all we 
know, and more than we can believe to be true, of William 
Shakespeare, the man. Not a word, not the remotest hint 
from friend or foe within the circle of his acquaintance, of 
a transcendent genius, or, indeed, of any literary ability 
whatever. 

" I cannot marry this fact to his verse." — E>nerson. 

"A mere fabulous story, a blind and extravagant error." — 
Schlegel. 

" What ! are we to have miracles in sport ? * * * Does God 
choose idiots by whom to convey divine truths to man ? " — Cole- 
ridge. 

* For Jonson's testimony, see supra, p. 43. 



III. 

FRANCIS BACON. 



I.. Setting aside Shakespeare, Bacon was the most origi- 
nal, the most imaginative, and the most learned man of his 
time. 

"The most exquisitely constructed intellect that has ever 
been bestowed on anj' of the children of men," — Macaulay. 

"The great glory of literature in this island, during the reign 
of James, was my Lord Bacon." — Hume. 

" Lord Bacon was the greatest genius that England, or perhaps 
any other country, ever produced." — Pojte. 

" The glory of the human intellect." — De Qtnncey. 

"Crown of all modern authors." — Geo. Sandys. 

"He possessed at once all those extraordinarjMalents which 
were divided amongst the greatest authors of antiquity. He had 
the sound, distinct, comprehensive knowledge of Aristotle, with 
all the beautiful lights, graces, and embellishments of Cicero. 
One does not know which to admire most in his writings, the 
strength of reason, force of style, or brightness of imagination." 
— A lidison . 



30 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

"His imagination was fruitful and vivid; a temperament of 
the most delicate sensibilit)'." — Montagu. 

" He belongs to the realm of the imagination, of eloquence, 
of jurisprudence, of ethics, of metaphj'sics; his writings have the 
gravit}' of prose, with the fervor and vividness of poetry." — 
Welsh. 

"Who is there that, hearing the name of Bacon, does not 
instantly recognize everything of genius the most profound, of 
literature the most extensive, of discovery the most penetrating, 
of observation of human life the most distinguishing and refined ?" 
— Edm itnd Burke. 

" Shakespeare and the seers do not contain more expressive 
or vigorous condensations, more resembling inspiration; in 
Bacon, they are to be found everywhere." — Taiiie. 

Addison, referring to a prayer composed by Bacon, says 
that " for elevation of thought and greatness of expression 
it seems rather the devotion of an angel than a man." 

The critics all concur in ascribing to Bacon a particu- 
larly powerful poetic faculty. No man ever had an imagi- 
nation, says Macaulay, " at once so strong and so thor- 
oughly subjugated. In truth, much of Bacon's life was 
passed /;/ a visionary world., amidst things as strange as any 
that are described in the Arabian tales." 

2. Bacon came of a family eminent for learning. His 
father, Nicholas Bacon, was Lord Chancellor and Keeper 
of the Great Seal under Elizabeth ; his mother, daughter 
of Sir Anthony Coke, tutor of the king. 



liRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. 31 

Of Bacon's mother, Macaulay writes : 

" She was distinguished both as a linguist and a theologian. 
She corresponded in Greek with Bishop Jewell, and translated his 
Apologia from the Latin so correctly that neither he nor Arch- 
bishop Parker could suggest a single alteration. She also trans- 
lated a series of sermons on fate and free-will from the Tuscan 
of Bernardo Ochino. Her sister, Katherine, wrote Latin hex- 
ameters and pentameters which would appear with credit in the 
Musci Etonenses. Mildred, another sister, was described b\' 
Roger Ascham as the best Greek scholar among the young 
women of England, Lady Jane Grey always excepted." 

3. Bacon had a strong desire for public employment, 
due, it is fair to infer, to the consciousness that he possessed 
exceptional powers for the service of the state. It was a 
creditable ambition, though the methods then in vogue to 
gratify it would, according to modern standards, hardly 
be deemed consistent with personal honor. It is certain 
that the reputation of being a poet, and particularly a dra- 
matic poet, writing for pay, would have compromised him 
at court. In those days play-acting and play-writing were 
considered scarcely respectable. The first theatre was 
erected in London in 1575, ten or twelve years only before 
the earliest production of Hamlet. The Government, in 
the interest of public morals, frowned upon the perform- 
ances. The Lord Mayor, in 1597, at the very time when 
the greatest of the Shakespeare Plays were coming out. 



32 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 



denounced the theatre as a " place for vagrants, thieves, 
horse-stealers, contrivers of treason, and other idle and 
dangerous persons." Taine speaks of the stage in Shake- 
speare's day as " degraded by the brutalities of the crowd, 
who not seldom would stone the actors, and by the severi- 
ties of the magistrates, who would sometimes condemn 
them to lose their ears." He thus describes the play-house 
as it then existed : 

"On a dirty site on the banks of the Thames rose the princi- 
pal theatre, the Globe, a sort of hexagonal tower, surrounded by 
a muddy ditch, on which was hoisted a red flag. The common 
people could enter as well as the rich; there were six-penny, two- 
penny, even penny seats; but the}' could not see it without 
money. If it rained, and it often rains in London, the people in 
the pit — butchers, mercers, bakers, sailors, apprentices — received 
the streaming rain upon their heads. I suppose the}' did not 
trouble themselves about it; it was not so long since that they 
began to pave the streets of London, and when men like these 
have had experience of sewers and puddles, they are not afraid 
of catching cold. 

"While waiting for the piece, they amuse themselves after 
their fashion — drink beer, crack nuts, eat fruits, howl, and now 
and then resort to their fists; they have been known to fall upon 
the actors and turn the theatre upside down. At other times, 
when they were dissatisfied, they went to the tavern to give the 
poet a hiding, or toss him in a blanket. When the beer took 
eflfect, there was a great upturned barrel in the pit, a peculiar 
receptacle for general use. The smell rises, and then comes the 



BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. ;^2 

cry, ' Burn the juniper ! ' They burn some in a plate on the stage, 
and the heavy smoke fills the air. Certainly, the folk there 
assembled could scarcely get disgusted at anything, and cannot 
have had sensitive noses." 

It may easily be imagined that Bacon, considering his 
high birth, aristocratic connections, and aspirancy for official 
honors, and already projecting a vast philosophical reform 
for the human race, would have shrunk from open alliance 
with an institution like this. 

4. To his confidential friend. Sir Toby Matthew, Bacon 
was in the habit of sending copies of his books as they came 
from the press. On one of these occasions he forwards, 
with an air of mystery and half apologetically, certain 
works which he describes as the product of his " recreation," 
called by him, also, curiously, " works of the alphabet," 
upon which not even Mrs. Pott's critical acumen has been 
able to throw, from sources other than conjecture, any 
light. In a letter addressed to Bacon by Matthew while 
abroad, in acknowledgment of some " great and noble 
token of favor," we find this sentence : 

" The most prodigious wit that ever I knew of my nation and 
of this side of the sea, is of your Lordship's name, though he be 
known by another." 

It has been suggested, not without reason, that the 
" token of favor " sent to Matthew was the folio edition 



34 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

of the Shakespeare Plays, published in 1623. It is certain 
that Matthew's letter was written subsequently to January 
27, 1621.* 

5. Bacon kept a commonplace book which he called a 
Promus, now in the archives of the British Museum. It 
consisted of several large sheets, on which from time to 
time he jotted down all kinds of suggestive and striking 
phrases, proverbs, aphorisms, metaphors, and quaint turns 
of expression, found in the course of his reading, and avail- 
able for future use. With the exception of the proverbs 
from the French, the entries, one thousand six hundred and 
fifty-five in number, are in his own handwriting. These 
verbal treasures are scattered, as thick as the leaves of Val- 
lombrosa, throughout the Plays. Mrs. Pott finds, by actual 
count, four thousand four hundred and four instances in 
which they are reproduced there — some of them, in more 
or less covert or modified form, over and over again. We 



♦Various attempts have been made to break the force of this testimony. 
It has been urged that, as Bacon had been raised to the peerage, he had 
acquired another name under which to publish his worlis. This seems too 
frivolous for serious remark. It has also been conjectured that Matthew may 
have been in Madrid, where a certain Francisco de Quevedo was writing 
under a pseudonym. Unfortunately for this theory, the Spaniard (who has 
never become distinguished, so far as we know, for " prodigious wit'') retained 
the name of Francisco, the only part that suggested Bacon's, in his pseudonym. 
The simple truth is, Matthew's description exactly fits the Shakespeare Plays 
and Bacon's literary alias. Indeed, on this ground alone we might ask, if it 
were legally permissible, that the court instruct the jury to find for plaintiff. 



BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. 35 

can almost see the architect at work, imbedding these 
gems of beauty and wisdom in the wonderful structures to 
which, according to Matthew, he gave the name of another. 
While they appear to a Umited extent in Bacon's prose 
works, they seem to have constituted a store-house of 
materials for particular use in the composition of the Plays. 
Two of these entries reappear in a single sentence in 
Romeo and Juliet. One is the unusual phrase, " golden 
sleep ; " and the second, the new word, " uproused," then 
added for the first time, like hundreds of others in the 
Plays, out of the same mint, to the verbal coinage of the 
realm. 

" But where unbruised youth with unstuffed brain 
Doth couch his limbs, there golden sleep doth reign; 
Therefore, thy earliness doth me assure. 
Thou art uproused by some distemperature." — ii., 3. 

To one familiar with the laws of chance, these coinci- 
dences will fall little short of a mathematical demonstra- 
tion. 

Perhaps the most interesting feature of the Promus is 
the group of salutatory phrases it contains, such as good- 
mornings good-day, and good-night, which had not then 
come into use in England, but which occur four hundred 
and nineteen times in the Plays. These salutations, how- 
ever, were common at that time in France, where Bacon, 



36 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE, 

as attache of the British Embassy, had spent three years 
in the early part of his hfe. To him we are doubtless 
indebted for these httle amenities of speech.* 

6. Other internal evidences also point unmistakably to 
Bacon's pen. Peculiarities of thought, style, and diction 
are more important in a contested case of authorship than 
the name on the title-page, for there we find the author's 
own signature in the very fibre of his work. We have 
only to hold the Plays, as it were, up to the light, to see 
the water-mark imprinted in them. To elucidate this point, 
we venture to spring upon our readers the deadly parallel : 

FROM SHAKESPEARE. FROM BACON. 

"There is a tide in the affairs of men " In the third place, I set down rep- 

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to utation, because of the peremptory 

fortune ; tides and currents it hath, which, if 

* * * * * they be not taken in their due time, 
And we must take the current when are seldom recovered." — Advance- 
it serves, jnent of Learning. 

Or lose our ventures." 

Julius Ceesar, iv., 3. 

* One or two specimens have been found in earlier literature, but the state- 
ment in the text is substantially correct. These salutations did not take root 
in English speech till they were implanted there by the author of the Plays. 

R. M. Theobald, Esq., Secretary ol the Bacon Society of London, sends us 
the following very pertinent suggestion on this subject: " The real significance 
of the Promus consists in the enormous proportion of notes which Bacon could 
not possibly have used in his acknowledged writings ; the colloquialisms, 
dramatic repartees, turns of expression, proverbs, etc. Any biographer of 
Bacon, whatever his notions as to the Shakespearean authorship, may be rea- 
sonably expected to oflFer some explanation of this queer assortment of 
oddments, and to find out, if possible, what use Bacon made of them; and then 
our case becomes urgent." 



BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. 



37 



FROM SHAKESPEARE. 

"To thine own self be true, 
And it must follow, as the night the 

day. 
Thou canst not then be false to any 

man." — Hamlet, i., 3. 

"That strain again; — it had a dying 

fall: 
O, it came o'er my ear like the 

sweet south. 
That breathes upon a bank of violets. 
Stealing and giving odor." 

Twelfth Night, i., i. 

*' This majestical roof fretted with 
golden fire." — Hamlet, ii., 2. 



" By a divine instinct, men's minds 

mistrust 
Ensuing danger; as, by proof, we 

see 
The waters swell before a boist'rous 

storm." — Richard III., ii., 3. 

" Who having unto truth, by tell- 
ing of it. 
Made such a sinner of his memory. 
To credit his own lie." 

Tempest, i., 2. 

" Losers will have leave 
To ease their stomachs with their bit- 
ter tongues." 

Titus Andronictis, iii, i. 

"The ivy which had hid mj- princely 

trunk. 
And sucked my verdure out on't." 

Tempest, i., 2. 



FROM BACON. 



" Be so true to thyself as thou be 
not false to others." — Essay 0/ Wis- 
dom, 



"The breath of flowers . . . comes 
and goes like the warbling of music." 
— Essay of Gardens. 



" For if that great work-master had 
been of a human disposition, he would 
have cast the stars into some pleasant 
and beautiful works and orders, like 
the frets in the roofs of houses." — 
A dvancement of Learning. 

" As there are . . . secret swellings 
of seas before a tempest, so there are 
in States." — Essay of Sedition. 



" With long and continual counter- 
feiting and with oft telling a lie, he 
was turned by habit almost into the 
thing he seemed to be ; and from a 
liar to a believer." — Hist. Henry 
VII. 

" Always let losers have their 
words." — The Provius. 



"It was ordained that this winding- 
ivy of a Plantagenet should kill the 
tree itself." — Hist. Henry VII. 



38 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 



FROM SHAKESPEARE. 

" I shall show the cinders ot my 
spirits 
Through the ashes of my chance." 

Antony and Cleopatra, \'., 2. 



FROM BACON. 



" The sparks of my affection shall 
ever rest quick under the ashes of my 
fortune." — Letter to Falkland. 



•' Lo ! as at English feasts, so 1 re- 
greet 

The daintiest last, to make the end 
most sweet." 

Richard II., i., 3. 



" Let not this Parliament end like a 
Dutch feast in salt meats, but like an 
English feast in sweet meats." 

Speech in Parliament, 1604. 



•' He gives the bastinado with his 

tongue ; 
Our ears are cudgelled." 

King John, ii., i. 



" No man loves one the better for 
givmg him a bastinado with a little 
cudgel." — Advice to Queen. 



" Nothing almost sees miracles 
But misery." 

King Lear, ii., 2. 



"Certainly, if miracles be the con- 
trol over nature, they appear most in 
adversity." — Essay of Adx'ersity. 



"Advantage is a better soldier than 
rashness." — Henry V., iii., 6. 



" With taper light 
To seek the beauteous eye of heaven 

to garnish, 
Is wasteful and ridiculous excess." 

King John, iv., 2. 



"If time give his Majesty the ad- 
vantage, what need precipitation to 
extreme remedies?" — Letter to Vil- 
liers. 

" But this work, shining in itself, 
needs no taper." — Amendment of 
Laws. 



"The wine of life is drawn, and the 

mere lees 
Is \&iV— Macbeth, ii., i. 



" The memory of King Richard lay, 
like lees, in the bottom of men's 
hearts."— A'w^. Henry VII. 



" Brother, you have a vice of mercy 

in you. 
Which better fits a lion than a man." 
Troilus and Cressida, v., 3. 



" For of lions it is a received belief 
that their fury ceaseth toward any- 
thing that yieldeth and prostrateth 
itself." *— Of Charity. 



* In this instance, as in many others, it requires Bacon's prose to explain 
Shakespeare's poetry. 



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39 



FROM BACON, 



" It is the wisdom of crocodiles, that 
shed tears when they would devour." 
— Essay of Wisdom. 



"There was an Egyptian sooth- 
sayer that made Antonius believe 
that his genius, which o.hervvise was 
brave and confident, was, in the pres- 
ence of Octavius Csesar, poor and 
cowardly ; and therefore he advised 
him to absent himself as much as he 
could, and remove far from him.''* — 
Nat. Hist. 



FROM SHAKESPEARE. 

"As the mournful crocodile 
With sorrow snares relenting passen- 
gers.' 

Second Henry VI., iii., 2. 

" Soothsayer : 

" Therefore, O Antonj-, stay not by 
his side ; 

Thy daemon, that's thy spirit which 
keeps thee, is 

Noble, courageous, high, unmatcha- 
ble, 

Where Caesar is not ; but near him 
thy angel 

Becomes a Fear, as being overpow- 
ered : therefore, 

Make space enough between you." 
A ntony and Cieofiatra., v., 2. 



The foregoing list might be extended almost indefinitely, 
but enough is given to show that on these two minds (if 
there were two) fell the light of intelligence, in repeated 
flashes, at the same exact angle. The cumulative force 
of these examples, taken in connection with the solid prej- 
udice against which, in some instances, they break in vain, 
reminds us of the charge of the Old Guard at Waterloo, 
the " irresistible meeting the immovable." 

7. Bacon's love of flowers perfumed his whole life. It 



♦The Natural Histoiy was not printed till eleven years after Shake- 
speare's death. It is clear, then, that Shakespeare did not take the story from 
Bacon. It is almost equally clear that Bacon did not take it from Shakespeare, 
for he adds a particular which is not in the play, viz.: " The soothsayer was 
thought to be suborned by Cleopatra to make Antony live m Egypt and other 
places remote from Rome." 



4° BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

was to him, as he said, " the purest of human pleasures." 
Of the thirty-five species of garden plants mentioned in the 
Plays, he enumerates thirty-two in his prose works, bending 
over them, as it were, lovingly and, like the dramatist, 
noting the seasons in which they bloom. In both authors, 
taste and knowledge go hand in hand. 

This point will bear elaboration, for the two methods of 
treatment seem to be mutually related, Hke the foliage of 
a plant and the exquisite blossom. Bacon says : " I do 
hold it, in the royal ordering of gardens, there ought to 
be gardens for all the months of the year, in which sever- 
ally things of beauty may be then in season ; " and with 
this end in view, he proceeds to classify plants according 
to their periods of blooming. 

Shakespeare, on his part, introduces to us a beautiful 
shepherdess distributing flowers among her friends ; to the 
young, the flowers of spring ; to the middle-aged, those 
of summer ; while the flowers that bloom on the edge of 
winter are given to the old. What is still more remark- 
able, however, the groupings in both are substantially the 
same. One commentator has even proved the correct- 
ness of a disputed reading in the play by reference to the 
corresponding passage in Bacon. 

We present the two Hsts, side by side, for comparison, 
as follows : 



BRIKF FOR PLAINTIFF. 



4' 



FROM SHAKESPEAKE. 

" Now, my fair'st friend, 

I would I had some flowers o' th' 
spring, that might 

Become your time of day; and yours; 
and yours; Daffodils, 

That come before the swallow dares, 
and take 

The winds of March with beauty; 
violets, dim, 

But sweeter than the lids of Juno's 
eyes, 

OrCytherea's breath; \>?i\^ primroses. 

That die unmarried ere they can be- 
hold 

Bright Phoebus in his strength, a mal- 
ady 

Most incident to maids; bold ox-lips 
and 

The crown imperial; lilieso/ all kinds. 

The flower-de-luce being one. 

" Sir, the year growing ancient — 

Not yet on summer's death, nor on 
the birth 

Of trembling winter — the fairest flow- 
ers o' th' season 

Are our carnations 2L.nA streaked ^z7//- 
flower. 
****** 

Hot lavender, mint,savory, marjoram; 

The marigold, that goes to bed with 
th' sun, 

And with him rises, weeping ; these 
are flowers 

Of middle summer, and I think they're 
given 

To men of middle age. 

" Reverend sirs, 
For you there's rosemary and rue; 

these keep 
Seeming ami savor all the winter 

)ong." — IFinter's Tale, iv., 3. 



FROM BACON. 

" There followeth, for the latter part 
of January and February, the maze- 
reon-tree, which then blossoms; . . . 
primroses, anemones, the early tulip. 
For March, there come violets, espe- 
cially the single blue, which are the 
earliest. In April, follow the double 
white violet, . . . the \>a.\e daffodil, the 
cowslip, flower-de-luces, and lilies 0/ 
all natures^ 



"In May and June come pinks of all 
sorts, specially the blush pink ; roses 
of all kinds, except the musk rose, 
which comes later; . . . the French 
marigold, . . . lavender in flowers. 
In July come gilliflowers of all vari- 
eties." 



" For December and January and 
the latter part of November, you must 
take such things as are green all win- 
ter, . . . fir-trees, rosemary, laven- 
der." — Essay 0/ Gardens. 



42 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

The essay was first printed in 1625, nine years after 
Shakespeare's death. It follows that Bacon, who had 
made a study of gardens all his life, either borrowed from 
Shakespeare or wrote the play. 

8. In 1867, there was discovered in a private library in 
London, a box of old papers, among which were some 
manuscripts of Francis Bacon, bound together in the form 
of a volume. In the table of contents on the title-page, 
among the names of other compositions known to be 
Bacon's, appear those of two of the Shakespeare Plays, 
Richard II. and Richard III., though the Plays themselves 
have been abstracted from the book. Judge Holmes adds 
the following piece of information in regard to this discov- 
ery : 

"The blank space at the side and between the titles is scrib- 
bled all over with various words, letters, phrases, and scraps of 
verse in English and Latin, as if the copj'ist were merely trying 
his pen and writing down whatever first came into his head. 
Among these scribblings, beside the name of Francis Bacon 
Several times, the name of William Shakespeare is written eight 
or nine times over." 

It is also at least a singular coincidence that the ex- 
traordinary word " honorificabihtudino," found here, oc- 
curs with a slight change of ending in Love's Labor's 
Lost. 



BRIEF FOR PLAIN II FF. 43 

9. At the death of Queen EHzabeth, John Davis, the 
poet and courtier, went to Scotland to meet James I. To 
him while on the journey northward, Bacon addressed a 
letter, asking kind intercession in his behalf with the King, 
and expressing the hope, in closing, that he (Davis) would 
be " good to concealed poets." 

10. Stratford, the home of Shakespeare, is not referred 
to in any of the Plays, nor the beautiful river Avon, on 
which it is situated ; but St. Albans, the residence of Bacon, 
is mentioned twenty-three times. Tender memories of 
Yorke Place, where Bacon was born,* and of the County 
of Kent, the home of his father's ancestry, are conspicuous 
in more than one of the Historical Plays. 

1 1 . Bacon was remarkably painstaking in preparing his 
works for the press. He rewrote the Novum Organ uiii 
twelve times, and the Essays thirty times, before he 
deemed them fit for publication. No wonder the editors 
of the Plays remarked upon the beauty and neatness of 
the copy. 

12. With the exception of a brief but briUiant career in 
Parliament, and an occasional service in unimportant causes 

*" Francis Bacon, the glory of his age and nation, the adorner and orna- 
ment of learning, was born in York House, or York Place, in the Strand, on 
tlie two and twentieth day of January, in the year of our Lord, 1560." — Li/e 
0/ Bacon, published in 1657, ^y Rawley^ his Lordship'' s Chaplain^ and subse- 
gueniiy Chaplain to the King. 



44 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

as attorney for the crown, Bacon seems to have been with- 
out employment from 1579, when he returned from France 
at the age of eighteen, to 1597, when he pubhshed his first 
volume of Essays. Here were nearly twenty of the best 
years of his life apparently run to waste. The volume of 
Essays was a small 12 mo, containing but ten out of the 
fifty-eight sparkling gems which subsequent editions gave 
to the admiration and delight of posterity. His philosoph- 
ical works, excepting a shght sketch in 1585, did not begin 
to appear till several years later. From 1597 to 1607, 
when he was appointed Solicitor General, he was again, so 
far as we know, substantially unemployed — a period of ten 
years, contemporaneous with the appearance of the great 
tragedies of Hamlet (rewritten), Juhus Csesar, King Lear, 
and Macbeth. In the meanwhile, he was hard pres.sed 
for money, and failing to get rehef (unhappily, before 
the days of Samuel Weller) in a vain effort to marry 
a wealthy widow, he was actually thrown into prison for 
debt.* 

That he was idle all this time, under great pecuniary 
pressure, his mind teeming with the richest fancy, it is 



* On one of these occasions, the debt was due to a Jewish money-lender, 
and was paid by Anthony, brother of Francis. At about that time appeared 
the great play. The Merchant of Venice^ in which a money-lending Jew is 
pilloried for all time, and the friend of the debtor is Antonio. 



BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. 45 

impossible to admit. Such a hypothesis is utterly incon- 
sistent with the possession of tho.se fixed, almost phenom- 
enal, habits of industry with which he afterward achieved 
magnificent results. On this point, indeed, we have inter- 
esting testimony from his mother. A woman of deep piety, 
mindful of the proprieties of her station in life, she evidently 
became alarmed over some mystery connected with her 
son. Probably she had a suspicion of its nature, for not 
even the genius that created Hamlet could subdue mater- 
nal instincts. In a letter to Anthony, the brother of 
Francis, under date of May 24, 1592, she expresses her 
solicitude, as follows : 

" I veril}' think your brother's weak stomach to digest hath 
been much caused and confirmed by untimely going to bed, and 
then musing nescio quid* when he should sleep." 

At another time, when the two brothers were together 
at Gray's Inn, and full of enthusiasm, as she knew, for the 
wicked drama, she wrote, begging them 

" Not to mum nor mask, nor sinfully revel." 

In these recreations, of which, according to Chamber- 
lain (who wrote in 1613), Bacon "was the chief contriver," 
he gained that practical knowledge of stage machinery 
which afterward served him so well, and which we find 



* I know not what. 



46 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

displayed with so much particularity in his Essay of Mas- 
ques.* 

It may be added that with his appointment to high office 
and advent into public life the production of the Shake- 
speare Plays suddenly ceased. t 

* It is interesting to note that Bacon regarded the drama as an educational 
instrumentality of the highest value. He says of it : 

"Although in modern states play-acting is esteemed but as a ludicrous thing, 
except when it is too satirical and biting, yet among the ancients it became a 
means of forming the souls of men to virtue. Even the wise and prudent, and 
great philosophers, considered it to be, as it were, the plectrum of the mind. 
And most certainly, what is one of the secrets of nature, the minds of men, 
when assembled together, are more open to affections and impressions than 
when they are alone." — De A ugtnentis. 

t What a crushing argument our friends on the other side would have made 
against Scott's authorship of the Waverly novels, had a kind Providence sent 
them into the world fifty years earlier ! Scott was a great poet, and previous 
to the publication of Waverly, in the forty-third year of his age, he had never 
written a romance in prose. In 1814, when Waverly made its mysterious 
appearance, Scott published in two volumes a work on Border Antiquities, 
contributed articles on Chivalry and the Drama to the Encyclopaedia 
Britannica, and edited the Life and Works of Dean Swift. The latter publica- 
tion, comprising nineteen volumes, was issued in the same week with 
Waverly. In the following year Guy Mannering appeared ; and also, from 
Scott, the two poems. Lord of the Isles and Field of Waterloo. In 1816, 
came in quick succession from the Great Unknown the Antiquary, Black 
Dwarf, Old Mortality, and Tales of My Landlord, first series; and in the 
same year from Scott's pen, PauCs Letters to His Kinsfolk and the Edinburgh 
Annual Register. The poem, Harold the Dauntless, was published in Jan- 
uary, 1817, preceded within thirty days by three of the above-named works of 
fiction. 

During all this time Scott was keeping '■ open house at Abbotsford in the 
old feudal fashion, and was seldom without visitors, entirely occupied to all 
outward appearance with local and domestic business and sport, building and 
planting, adding wing to wing, acre to acre, plantation to plantation, with just 



BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF, 47 

13. Ben Jonson was Bacon's private secretary, and pre- 
sumably in the secret, if there were any, of his employer's 
literary undertakings. In this fact we find the key to the 
exquisite satire of the inscription, composed by him and 
printed opposite Shakespeare's portrait in the foHo of 1623, 
of which the following, in reference to the engraver's art, 
is an extract : 

" O, could he but have drawn his wit 
As well in brasse as he hath hit 
His face, the print would then surpass 
All that was ever writ in brasse." 

It is a straw, but one carrying with it, perhaps, "the 
wisdom of the fathers," that in this invocation Jonson 
speaks of the Plays as superior to 

" All that insolent Greece or haughty Rome sent forth ;" 

while in a subsequent book of his own, he uses exactly 
the same language in describing Bacon's genius : 

" He performed that in our tongue which may be compared or 
preferred either to insolent Greece or haughty Rome." 

Ben Jonson and Sir Toby Matthew made lists of the 
great wits of their time and of the preceding century ; 

leisure enough for the free-hearted entertainment of his guests and the culti- 
vation of friendly relations with his humble neig;hbors." 

He even mystified some of his most intimate friends by reviewing one of 
his own novels in the Quarterly. 



48 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

both placed Bacon at the head ; neither of them mentioned 
Shakespeare. The reasonable explanation is that they 
were in the secret. 

Jonson pronounced Bacon *' the mark and acme of our 
age." Matthew wrote of him : 

" A man so rare in knowledge, of so many several kinds, 
indued with the facility and felicity of expressing it all, in so 
elegant, significant, so abundant and yet so choice and ravishing 
a way of words, of metaphors and allusions, as perhaps the world 
has not seen since it was a world." 

14. Bacon's authorship of the Plays was not unsus- 
pected during his life-time. When he was appointed by the 
Queen to join in the prosecution of Essex for treason, and 
was assigned to that count of the indictment which charged 
connivance with the play-actors in producing the play of 
Richard II., he protested, on the ground that his name was 
already bruited about in that connection, and it would 
now be said of him, in derision, that he gave in evidence 
his own tales* These minors could have originated only 
in the recognized inadequacy of the reputed authorship. 

* Bacon's exact language, applying primarily to Hayward's pamphlet, but 
with a deeper significance, as we may infer from the Queen's wrath over the 
performance of the play, was as follows : 

" Whereupon I replied to that allotment, and said to their Lordships, that it 
was an old matter, and had no manner of coherence with the rest of the 
charges, being matters of Ireland, and thereupon that I having been wronged 



BKIKK FOR PLAINTIFF, 49 

15. With the exception of the isolated play of King 
John, the series depicting English history extends from 
the deposition of Richard II. to the birth of Elizabeth, in 
the reign of Henry VIII. In this long chain, there is one 
break and one only — the important period of Henry VII., 
when the foundations of social order, as we now have them, 
were tirmly laid. The omission, on any but the Baconian 
theory of authorship, is inexplicable, for the dramatist 
could hardly have failed, except for personal considerations, 
to drop his plummet into the richest and most instructive 
experiences of political life that lay in his path. The 
truth is. Bacon wrote a history of the missing reign in prose. 



by bruits before, this would expose me to them more; and it would be said 1 
gave in evidence mine own tales." 

It is certainly remarkable that Bacon was able to preserve his incognito 
as well as he did, considering that in Sonnet LXXVI. we tind the following: 

" Why write I still all one, ever the same, 
And keep invention in a noted weed, 
That every word doth almost tell my name. 
Showing their birth and where they do proceed ? " 

Here is a plain statement that the author of this sonnet was writing under 
a disguise. 

The same remarkable admission appears in Bacon's prayer : 

"The state and bread of the poor and oppressed have been precious in mine 
eyes ; I have hated all cruelty and hardness of heart ; I have, though in a 
despised weed, sought the good of all men." 

In the sonnets, he had assumed a popular literary dress; but here, on his 
knees before God, he confesses to a higher kind of composition that was "' de- 
spised." . 



50 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

which exactly fills the gap ; the one is tongued and grooved, 
as it were, into the other. 

1 6. Troilus and Orssida was published for the first time, 
without reservation, in 1609. A writer in the preface claims 
special credit for the work on the ground that it had not 
been produced on the public stage, or (to use his own 
words) " never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vul- 
gar," or " sullied with the smoky breath of the multitude." 
Then he thanks fortune that a copy of the play had es- 
caped from "grand possessors." 

Three inferences seem to be justifiable, viz. : i. The au- 
thor was indifferent to pecuniary reward;* 2. He was not 
a member of the theatrical profession ; 3. He was of high 
social rank. 

17. The Plays, as they came out, were first published 
anonymously. Several of them had been in the hands of 
the public for years before the name of Shakespeare ap- 
peared on the title-page. Other plays, not belonging to 
the Shakespearean canon, and most of them of very infe- 
rior merit, were also given to the world as Shakespeare's. 
AVe have fifteen of these heterogeneous compositions at- 
tributed to the same " divine " authorship, — geese and 



* At this time, Bacon was in easy circumstances. By the death of his 
brother he had come into possession of Gorhambury and other remnants of the 
family estate ; and he was in receipt of a salary from the government. 



BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. 5 1 

eagles coming helter-skelter from a single nest, — at a time 
when Coke, the law officer of the government, declared 
poetasters and playwrights to be "fit subjects for the 
grand jury as vagrants." It was enough for the impecu- 
nious authors of these plays that Shakespeare, manager 
and part proprietor of two theatres, and amassing a large 
fortune in the business, was willing, apparently, to adopt 
every child of the drama laid on his door-step. This ac- 
counts for the venomous shaft which Greene in his envy 
aimed at him. Greene was a writer for the stage, and 
took occasion one time, in a little squib addressed to his 
professional brethren, to refer to one " Shake-scene " as 
" an upstart crow beautified with our feathers." It is evi- 
dent, nevertheless, that Shakespeare was a favorite 7iom dc 
plume with the dramatic wits of his time. 

18. The first complete edition of the Plays, substantially 
as we now have them, was the famous foHo, from the au- 
thor's manuscripts, of 1623. Its titles number thirty-six, 
and may be classified, for our present piu-pose, as follows : 
Plays, previously printed, in various quartos, at dates rang- 
ing from 1597 to 1609, eighteen; those not previously 
printed, but known to have been produced on the stage, 
twelve ; lastly, those, so far as we know, entirely new, six. 
Of the Plays in the first class, it is found, by comparison, 
that several had been rewritten, and in some cases greatly 



52 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

enlarged, during the fourteen years or mere subsequent to 
their first appearance. The same is probably true of some 
in the second class, though on this point we are, naturally 
enough, without means of verification. In any event, 
however, it is certain that the compositions which were 
new, together with those which, by changes and accre- 
tions, had been made new, constitute no inconsiderable 
part of the book.* Who did this work? Who prepared it 
for the press? Shakespeare died in 1616, seven years be- 
fore the folio was published, and for six years before his 
death he had lived in Stratford, without facilities for such 
a task, and in a social atmosphere in the highest degree 
unfavorable for it. On the other hand. Bacon retired to 
private life in 1621, at the age of .sixty, in the plenitude of 
his powers, and under circumstances that would naturally 



* The most noteworthy examples under this head are the Secofid and Third 
Parts of Henry VI. These plays were fiist published in 1594 and '95, under the 
titles, respectively, of the First Part 0/ the Contention between the Two Fatnozis 
Houses, York and Lancaster, and the True Tragedy 0/ Richard, Dukeof York. 
They were republished in 1600, and again in 1619 (three years after Shake- 
speare's death), under the same creneral title and in other respects, also, substan- 
tially as first printed. In the folio of 1623, however, they appear under new 
titles and largely rewritten. The Second Part (for instance), containing three 
thousand and fifty-seven lines, suddenly comes out with fifteen hundred and 
seventy-eight lines entirely new, and with about one half of the remainder al- 
tered or expanded from passages in the old. 

The Plays were revised and collected for final publication at the same time 
that Bacon revised and collected his prose work.i, for the same purpose, 162T-6. 
The coincidence is worthy of mention. 



BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. 53 

cause him to roll this apple of discord, refined into the 
purest gold, down the ages. 

19. Other mysteries cluster around this edition. The 
ostensible editors were two playwrights, named Heminge 
and Condell, formerly connected with the company of 
which Shakespeare was a member. Heminge appears, also, 
to have been a grocer. In the dedication of the book, they 
characterize the Plays, with singular, not to say suspicious, 
infehcity, as " trifles." They astonish us still more by the 
use they make of Pliny's epistle to Vespasian, prefixed to 
his Natural History, and not translated into English till 
1635. Not only are the thoughts of the Latin author most 
happily introduced, but they are amplified and fitted to the 
purpose with consummate literary skill. 

Then follows a pithy address to the public, in which the 
editors seek to justify their revolutionary work, undertaken 
so long after Shakespeare's death, on the ground that all 
previous publications of the Plays had been made from 
stolen copies and were, therefore, inaccurate as well as 
fraudulent. A comparison of the two sets, however, dis- 
closes a state of things quite inconsistent with the sincerity 
of Messrs. Heminge and Condell. Some of the finest pas- 
sages, given in the quartos, are omitted in the P^olio, one 
particularly in Hamlet, in which the genius of the author, 
as Swinburne asserts, "soars up to the verv highest of its 



54 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

height and strikes down to the very deepest of its depth.'* 
In King Lear, also, but for the " stolen copies," the follow- 
ing description of Cordelia's sorrow, together with the 
whole scene containing it, would have been lost forever : 

" You have seen 
Sunshine and rain at once; her smiles and tears 
Were like a better May; those happy smilets, 
That play'd on her ripe lip, seemed not to know 
What guests were in her eyes ; which parted thence, 
As pearls from diamonds dropp'd." 

And who is not shocked at the statement in the Folio 
that Desdemona, at one of her first interviews with the 
swarthy Moor, received the story of his life " with a 
world," not of sighs, but — " of kisses " ! 

The truth is, the quartos are precisely what we should 
have expected them to be, early but authentic drafts, 
brought into final shape by the author, under extraordinary 
mental distractions, in the folio. The strata may be tilted 
and broken, but they tell us of the great forces of nature, 
the elemental fires that seethed beneath them. 

Ben Jonson's contribution is, also, clearly susceptible of 
a double meaning. In the verses opposite the portrait, he 
draws a sharp distinction (as well he might) between the 
lineaments there presented and those of the mighty intellect 
which the printed page sets before us. 



BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. 55 

" Look, 
Not on his picture, but his book." 



In these well-known lines, he paraphrases a Latin inscrip- 
tion found under Bacon's own portrait, converting it into 
one of the brightest flashes in this symposium of wit. 

On the subject of Shakespeare's art, Jonson's mind was 
apparently in a state of hopeless confusion. In his con- 
versations with Drummond, he declared unqualifiedly that 
Shakespeare had no art. In his metrical introduction to 
the Folio, he declares, just as unqualifiedly, that Shakespeare 
had art, and that of the most pronounced and toilsome 
character. He goes so far as to liken the author of the 
Plays to a blacksmith sweating over an anvil. Riding two 
horses, even if one were Pegasus, was evidently an ungra- 
cious task for Rare Old Ben. 

20. It would be well-nigh miraculous if in all these works, 
dealing as they do with every kind and degree of human 
vicissitude, we could not find somewhere in them a trace 
of the author's own personality. Indeed, editors have been 
constantly searching for it, even at the risk of converting 
exegesis into biography. Two of them, for instance, have 
surmised that the dramatist was educated at Oxford or 
Cambridge and afterwards trained to law at one of the 
Inns of Court, because Justice Shallow recommends such a 



56 BACON VS. SHAKKSPKARE. 

course of study (actually pursued by Bacon) in Hcury /J\ 
It is not surprising, therefore, that, on the supposition of 
Bacon's authorship, we should discover in two of the plays 
unmistakable marks of a great crisis in his Hfe. These two 
are Tiimvt of Athens and Henry VIII. They seemed 
to be filled, like ocean shells, with the dash and roar 
of waves. They were both printed for the first time in 
the Folio of 1623, the Timon never having been heard 
of before, and the other also, almost as certainly, a new 
production. An older play, entitled All is True, based on 
unknown incidents of the same reign, was on the boards of 
the Globe Theatre on the night of the fire in 1613, but we 
have no reason to believe that it was the magnificent 
Shakespearean drama of He my VI I I, at least in the form 
in which it was printed in the Folio ten years later. 

The catastrophe that overwhelmed Bacon in 162 1 was 
one of the saddest in the annals of our race. No wonder 
Timon hurls invectives at his false friends, and Cardinal 
Wolsey utters his grand, but pathetic, lament over fallen 
greatness ! Such storms of feeling, sweeping over a human 
soul, must have gathered their force among the mountains 
and valleys of a mighty personal experience. 

The most astonishing feature of this contro\ersy is the 
light it has thrown on the literature of the Elizabethan age. 



BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. 57 

Among the great men who made that age famous, no one, 
with the exception of Jonson, seems to have taken any notice 
either of Shakespeare or of the subhnie creations which bear 
his name. Bacon's silence, itself very significant, and Jonson's 
doubtful panegyrics are explained ; but what shall we say of 
Raleigh, Drake, Herbert, Pym, and the rest? Imagine the 
inhabitants of Lilliput paying no attention to Gulliver! 

" Since the constellation of great men who appeared in Greece 
in the time of Pericles, there was never any such society; yet 
their genius failed them to find out the best head in the universe." 

— Emerson. 

The popular prejudice against the drama, behind which, 
as an almost impenetrable veil, the Shakespeare Plays were 
once hid, is only now passing away. Josiah Quincy tells 
us that, as late as in 1820, as whispered among the boys 
fitting for college at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., 
a professor in the neighboring theological seminary had 
among his books, to the evident jeopardy of his soul, the 
works of a playwright, named Shakespeare 1 

If Bacon was the author of the Shakespeare Plays, as it 
now appears probable that he was, it is difficult to exag- 
gerate, in a literary point of view, the importance of the 
discoverv. To our own countrywoman, Deha Bacon, be- 
longs the everlasting honor, and also, alas! in the long line 
of the world's benefactors, the crown of martvrdom. 



IV. 
OBJECTIONS CONSIDERED. 



As counsel for defendant may be disposed at this point 
to demur to the evidence and thus take the case from the 
jury, we feel obliged to file a statement of facts and objec- 
tions on the other side, arranged seriatim in the inverse 
order of their importance, as follows ; 

I. From 1598, when the publication of the Phiys ceased to 
be anonymous^ to 1848, whe7i Joseph C. Hart, an American, 
publicly initiated the doubt concerning their authorship, a 
period of two hundred and fifty years, the whole world, nem. 
con., attributed them to William Shakespea?'e. 

The Plays came into existence in obscurity. No person 
appears to have taken the slightest interest ''n their putative 
author. His very insignificance saved him from prosecu- 
tion when the play of Richard II. was used by Essex for 



BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. 59 

treasonable ends. And the same indifference to him con- 
tinued for a long time after his death. The critics were as 
blind to the character of these great works as they were, 
in the early part of the present century, to the merits of 
Wordsworth, whom the most eminent of them at one time 
flatly denounced as little better than an idiot. Wordsworth 
now ranks as third in the list of British poets. 

Mr. Appleton Morgan, in his brilliant contribution to 
the literature of this subject, reminds us of the general 
contempt in which the Plays were buried for about two 
hundred years. In i66i> Evelyn reports that they "begin 
to disgust this refined age." Pepys preferred Hudibras to 
Shakespeare, pronouncing Midsummer Night's Dream " the 
most insipid, ridiculous play " he had ever seen. In 1681, 
Tate, a poet who afterward wore the laurel, could find no 
epithet sufficiently opprobrious to express his opinion of 
" King Lear," and so he called it simply " a thing." In 
Hume's condemnation, Shakespeare and Bacon were yoked 
together as wanting in " simplicity and purity of diction." 
Addison styled the Plays " very faulty," and Johnson 
asserted, with his usual emphasis, that Shakespeare never 
wrote six consecutive hnes " without making an ass of him- 
self." Dryden, though not without lucid intervals of high 
appreciation, still regarded Shakespeare and Fletcher as 
" below the dullest writers of our own or any preceding 



6o 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 



age," full of " solecisms of speech," " flaws of sense," and 
"ridiculous and incoherent stories meanly written." He 
disapproved altogether of Shakespeare's style, describing it 
as " pestered with figurative expressions," " affected " and 
"obscure." John Dennis thought himself competent to 
rewrite the Plays, and he actually put one or two of them, 
" revised and improved," on the boards in London, appar- 
ently without the least suspicion, on the part of the audiences 
that witnessed them, of any sacrilege. Another astonishing 
critic was Rymer, who comes to us indorsed by Pope as 
"learned and strict." He says of Desdemona : "There is 
nothing in her which is not below any country kitchen- 
maid ; no woman, bred out of a pig-sty, could talk so 
meanly." The " Troilus and Cressida " he called a " heap 
of rubbish." 

On the other side, we have a stock quotation from 
Milton, as follows : 

"Or sweetest Sliakespeare, Fanc)-'s child, 
Warble his native wood-notes wild," 

requiring a considerable stretch of the imagination to 
apply to the Plays. Milton was a Puritan, and probably 
never soiled his fingers with a copy of them. He had some 
knowledge of their character, to be sure, for he accused 
Charles I. of making them and "other stuff of this sort" 
his daily reading. Evidently, in Milton's opinion, a king 



BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. 6l 

who read and admired Hamlet or Othello deserved to lose 
his head. 

With such sentiments as these in vogue regarding the 
Plays themselves, how much value should we attach to the 
concurrent belief in the authorship of them ? Why should 
men look upward for a star, when they are content to see 
it reflected in the dirty puddles of the streets? And how 
natural, linder a law of moral mechanics, the swinging of 
public opinion, from bhnd detraction at one time to equally 
blind idolatry at another ! 

2. // is hardly conceivabh' that Bacon, if the author of these 
7c>orks, woitld not have chiimed the credit of them before he 
died, or, at /east, left posthiaiioits proofs that uwuhi have 
established his title to them. 

Bacon had one great aim in life, an aim that, it seems to 
us, gave a fine consistency to all that he did. He sought 
to instruct in better ways of thinking, not his own gen- 
eration alone, but those that were to come after. " I feel 
myself born," he says in one of his letters, " for the service 
of mankind." Accordingly, we find him in his will be- 
queathing sets of his philosophical works and his essays to 
the chief public libraries of the kingdom. He even trans- 
lated them into Latin, for the avowed reason that our 
modern languages are ej)hemeral, while Latin will last as 



<52 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

long as human speech. In his will, also, with the sublime 
confidence that is inseparable from genius, he left his name 
and memory to the " next ages." 

At the same time, he showed no anxiety for personal 
credit. His mind was bent on grander results. In the 
introduction to one of his books, unpublished at the time 
of his death, he asks his executors to leave some parts of it 
unprinted, in order that they might be passed in manuscript 
"from hand to hand." He had the curious conception 
that in this impersonal way certain truths might take deeper 
root. Then follow these noble words : 

"For myself, mj' heart is not set upon any of those things 
which depend on external accidents. I am not hunting for fame. 
I have no desire to found a sect, after the fashion of the heresi- 
archs ; and to look for any private gain from such an undertaking 
as this, I should consider both ridiculous and base. Enough for 
me the consciousness of well-deserving, and those real and effect- 
ual results with which fortune itself cannot interfere." 

The ring of these words three centuries have not dulled. 
They will ring through all time, for they are of pure gold. 

It should be remembered, too, that Bacon had an am- 
bition to occupy his father's seat on the woolsack, and that 
to be known as a writer of plays for money would have 
been fatal to his advancement. After his downfall, he had 
not the heart, if he had the will, for the exposure. He 



BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. 63 

may well have hesitated to make another invidious con- 
fession in the face of a frowning world.* 

"The question wh)' Bacon, if he were the composer of the 
Plays, did not acknowledge the authorship, is not difficult to an- 
swer. His birth, his position and his ambition forbade him, the 
nephew of Lord Burleigh, the future Lord Chancellor of England, 
to put his name on a play-bill. In the interest of his family and 
of his political career, the secret must be so strictly preserved that 
mere anonymity would not be sufficient. A live man-of-straw, a 
responsible official representative known to every one, was re- 
quired. No person could be better fitted for such a purpose than 
an actor, wise enough to understand and appreciate what was to 
his own advantage. Perhaps this ' Johannes Factotum ' of Greene's 
did not know the name of his benefactor. But even if he did 
know the name, it was obviously to his interest to keep from the 
world, and particularly from his gossiping companions, a secret 
which brought him money and fame." — Al/gemeine Zeitniig. 

3. The Plays contain anachronisms and other errors which 
Bacon, " who took all knotvledge for his province" cot/Id not 
have committed. 

Chief among the errors in question, of sufficient impor- 
tance to be noted here, are the following : 

* A French critic has conjectured that Bacon may have left instructions to 
his executors to divulge the secret at some opportune time after his death, but 
that the alarming growth of Puritanism, culminating in its complete ascendency 
under Cromwell twenty-five years later, rendered such a step inexpedient. 
Holding his reputation in trust and knowing what a fierce popular storm the 
announcement would cause, they may have deemed it their duty to let the 
Plays remain as " Mr. William Shakespeare's," until such time as these writings 
might reveal by their own light the name and genius of the author. 



64 HACON vs. SHAKESPEARE. 

1. The famous one in the quotation from Aristotle: 

" Young men whom Aristotle thoughl unfit to hear moral 
philosoph}'." — T}-oi/t(s and Cress/da , ii., 3. 

It was /^////tv?/ philosophy that Aristotle referred to ; but 
Bacon makes the same mistake. He quotes the Greek as 
saying : 

" Young men are no fit auditors of moral philosophy." 

Even in their blunders, our two authors were not divided. 

2. The curious conception of heat in its " mode of mo- 
tion," one flame pushing another by force out of its place. 

Shakespeare : 

"Even as one heat another heat expels, or as one nail by 
strength drives out another. — 7\c'o Gentlemen of J^erona, ii., 4. 

"One fire drives out one fire; one nail, one nail." — Coriohmns, 
iv., 7. 

Bacon : 

" Flame doth not mingle with flame, but remaineth con- 
tiguous." — Advancement of Learning. 

■■riavum clavo pellere." [To drive out a nail with a nail.] — 
Prom us. 

The materiality of heat was a dogma of the ancients. 
It held almost absolute sway over mankind till long after 
the time of Francis Bacon ; but this nail illustration, found 
in Bacon's intellectual work-shop and reproduced in the 



BRIEF FOK PLAINTIFF. 65 

Plays, is startling. It may fairly be said to clinch the 
argument. 

3. Mark Antony tells the Romans that he comes 

" To bury C?esar, not to praise him," 
knowing that the Romans did not bury the bodies of their 
dead. 

The play was written for an Enghsh stage, and for an 
audience to whom cremation was practically unknown. 
The reference to burial indicates the art, rather than the 
ignorance, of the dramatist. What would our critics say 
of a famous actor of modern times who always armed the 
Roman guard in the play with Springfield muskets ! 

" Shakespeare turns his Romans into Englishmen, and he does 
light, for otherwise his nation would not have understood him." — 
Goethe. 

4. A Trojan hero quotes Aristotle, Cleopatra plays bill- 
iards, and a clock strikes the hours in Ancient Rome. 

Historical perspective is not necessary to the drama. 
The poet sees the world reflected on a retina that ignores 
time and place. He ideahzes facts. Egypt, Greece, 
Rome, Pericles, Caesar, are so many stars set in his fir- 
mament and shining apparently in one plane. This illu- 
.sion extended even to the accessories of the stage in 

Shakespeare's day. There was no scenery to help the 
5 



66 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

spectators.* Imagination was left to its own unaided 
wings, with nothing but the atmosphere of the play to 
sustain it. At the call of the magical flute piping through 
the universe, biUiards, clocks, Ilium, all local and tem- 
porary objects of sense, " shot madly from their spheres," 
in blind obedience to the melody. 

" Poesy is feigned history, wliich, being not tied to the laws of 
matter, may at pleasure join that which nature hath severed, and 
sever that which nature hath joined, and so make unlawful 
matches and divorces of things." * — Bacon. 

"There is no reason why an hour should not be a century in 
the calenture of the brains that can make the stage a field." — Dr. 
Johnson. 

Numerous other errors of a minor character are found in 
the Plays, though, like the spots on the sun's disk, they are 
lost to all but professional observers in the radiance that 
envelops them. Paradoxical as it may seem, however, 
these very blemishes are a distinct indication of Bacon's 
authorship. We find the same in his prose works. The 

* The want of scenic effects is thus portrayed by Sir Philip Sydney : 
" You shall have Asia of the one side and Africa of the other, and so many 
other under kingdoms that the player when he comes in must ever begin witli 
telling where he is. . . . Now, you shall have three ladies walk to gather flow- 
ers, and then you must believe the stage to be a garden ; by and by, we have 
news of a shipwreck in the same place, and we are to blame if we accept it not 
for a rock. tJpon the back of that comes a hideous monster, with fire and smoke, 
and the miserable beholders are bound to take it for a cave ; while, in the mean- 
time, two armies fly in, represented with four swords and bucklers, and then 
what hard heart will not receive it for a pitched field ? " 



BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. 67 

great philosopher, notwithstanding his industry and his 
learning, was singularly careless in some of the minutiae of 
his work. The sublime confidence with which he employed 
his mental powers often made a " sinner of his memory." 
It was simply impossible, in the multipHcity and magnitude 
of his productions, particularly if the Plays be superadded, 
to prevent unimportant errors from creeping in. In no 
other way can we account for the false quotation from 
Solomon in the Essay of Revenge, or that from Tacitus in 
the Essay of Traditions. The grammatical mistakes in the 
Latin entries of the Promus, written with his own hand, 
would send a school-boy to the bottom of his class, but 
they put a tongue in every wound of syntax found in the 
Plays. 

In this connection, it may be not be amiss to quote a 
few of Bacon's Apothegms, with Devey's notes (Bohn's 
standard edition) appended to them, as follows : 

" Michael Angelo, the famous painter, made one of the damned 
souls in his portraiture of hell so like a cardinal, his enemy, 
as everybod)' at first sight knew it. Whereupon the cardinal 
complained to the Pope, humbly praying it might be effaced. The 
Pope said to him, ' Why, you know very well I have power to de- 
liver a soul out of purgatory, but not out of hell.' " 

The victim was not a cardinal, but the Pope's master of 
ceremonies. 



68 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

"A king of Hungary took a bishop in battle, and kept him 
prisoner. Whereupon, the Pope writ a monitory to him, for that 
he had broken the privilege of hol}^ church and taken his son. 
The king, in reply, sent the armor wherein the bishop was 
taken, and this only in writing : ' Know now whether this be thy 
son's coat?' " 

It was Richard Cceur de Lion who did this, and not a 
king of Hungary. 

"Antigonus, when it was told him that the enemy had such a 
volley of arrows that they did hide the sun, said : ' That falls out 
well, for it is hot weather, and so we shall fight in the shade.' " 

This was a speech, not of Antigonus, but of a Spartan, 
previous to the battle of Thermopylae. 

"One of the seven was wont to say that laws are like cob- 
webs, where small flies are caught, but the great break through." 

This was said, not by a Greek, but by Anacharsis, the 
Scythian. 

'■ An orator of Athens said to Demosthenes : ' The Athenians 
will kill you if they wax mad.' Demosthenes replied: 'And 
they will kill you if they be in good sense.' " 

This retort was made to Demosthenes by Phocion. 

'■ Demetrius, king of Macedon, had a petition ofTered him 
divers times by an old woman, and answered he had no leisure. 
Whereupon the woman said aloud : ' Why, then, give over to be 
king.' " 

This happened, not to Demetrius, but to Philip. 



BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. 69 

"A philosopher disputed with Adrian, the emperor, and did 
it but weakly. One of his friends, that stood by, afterward said 
to him : ' Methinks you were not like yourself in argument with 
the emperor. I could have answered better myself.' 'Why,' 
said the philosopher, ' would you have me contend with him that 
commands thirty legions?'" 

This took place, not under Adrian, but under Augustus 
Caesar. 

" Chilon said that kings' friends and favorites are like 
counters, that sometimes stand for one, sometimes for ten, and 
sometimes for an hundred." 

This was the saying of Orontes. 

"Alexander, after the battle of Granicum, had very great 
offers made to him by Darius ; consulting with his captains con- 
cerning them, Parmenio said : ' Sure, I would accept these ofters, 
if I were Alexander.' Alexander answered : ' So would I, if I 
were Parmenio.' " 

This happened after the battle of Issus. 

The above are gross blunders, far more astonishing than 
any found in the works of Shakespeare. Abbott testifies 
on this point as follows : 

" We have abundant proof that he [Bacon] was eminently in- 
attentive to details. His scientific works are full of inaccuracies. 
King James found in this defect of his Chancellor the matter for 
a witticism : ' De rniminis iion curat lex.' '' * 

* The law takes no notice of trifles. 



^O BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

4. Shakespeare and Bacon were of essentially different 
types of mind, the Noi'um Organuni and the conception of 
Falstaff being respectively at opposite poles, and wholly beyond 
the range of one man'' s powers. 

Bacon's mind had as many facets as a diamond ; turn it 
whichever way you will, it gives a flash. No feature of it 
was more conspicuous, in the eyes of his contemporaries, 
than his wit. It was simply prodigious. Ben Jonson says 
that, even on solemn occasions, Bacon could with difficulty 
" spare or pass by a jest." Macaulay asserts that in this 
respect he " never had an equal." 

" He possessed this faculty, or this faculty possessed him, in 
a morbid degree. When he abandoned himself to it without 
reserve, as he did in Sapientia Veterum, or at the end of the second 
book of De Augmentis, the feats which he performed were not 
onl)'^ admirable, but portentous and almost shocking. On those 
occasions, we marvel at him as clowns on a fair-day marvel at a 
juggler, and can hardly help thinking that the devil must be in 
him." — Macaulay. 

It seems like piling Ossa on Pelion to add that the world's 
most famous jest-book we owe to Francis Bacon, dictated 
by him from a sick-bed, entirely from memory, in one day. 
No wonder the portly Falstaff sprang, full-grown, from 
such a brain ! 



HRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. 71 

5. The autJior of the Essay on Love couhi not have luritteti 
Romeo and Juliet. 

The two productions are certainly widely dissimilar. In 
one, the tender passion is a flower in bloom, exquisitely 
sweet and beautiful ; in the other, it is torn up by the roots 
and analyzed 'scientifically, not to say contemptuously. 
Indeed, Bacon quotes with approval an old saying that a 
man cannot love and be wise. 

We have no direct evidence to show that the author of 
the essay did not possess a susceptible heart. To be sure, 
he was married late (at the age of forty-five), and was 
unfortunate in losing the affections of his wife before he 
died. It may be worthy of note, also, that the play was 
written several years before, and the essay several years 
after, his marriage. We cannot admit, however, in any 
view of his matrimonial adventure, that he was disqualified 
to write the garden scene in Romeo and Juhet. It is not 
necessary to possess a trait in order to depict it. We 
instinctively see and appreciate what is exactly opposite to 
us in mental aptitudes. Human nature makes an uncon- 
scious effort in this way to round itself out into the com- 
plete and perfect. The theory of complementary colors is 
based on this tendency. Unity in diversity is the ideal of 
married life. Tom Hood was the wittiest of men and, at 
the same time, one of the most melancholy. The President 



72 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

of a New England Theological Seminary, who was very 
penurious, preached the ablest sermon of his life on charity. 
The people of Scotland are notoriously intemperate every 
Satiurday night ; it is said that forty thousand persons get 
drunk at that time in the city of Glasgow alone ; and yet 
the finest idyl in our language, consecrated to the domes- 
tic peace and rehgious sanctity of that season, we owe to 
a Scottish poet, himself in full accord with the habits of 
his countrymen.* 

6. Among Bacon's knoiun works ^ 7ve find some fragments 
of verse which show him utterly wanting in the fine phrensy 
of the poet. 

Bacon's acknowledged poetry, it is safe to say, would 
not have made him immortal. We know that he wrote a 
sonnet to the Queen, but unless it be included in the 
Shakespeare collection, it is lost. In the year before he 
died, and while incapacitated by illness for good work, he 
paraphrased a few of the Psalms, which he afterward pub- 
lished, and which would seem to be, at first sight, only so 
many nails driven into the coffin of his poetic aspirations. 
It is manifestly unfair, however, to judge of his capabilities 
in this line by a sick-bed effort. He was necessarily 

* "A New View of the Temperance Question," 2d ed , p. 17. 



BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. 73 

hampered, too, by the restrictions that always attend the 
transplanting of an exotic in full bloom, lest the little 
tendrils of speech that give the flower its beauty and fra- 
grance be broken. The President of a New England college 
once made a similar adventure with the Psalms, but, when 
the book appeared, the author's friends bought up the 
entire edition and suppressed it. 

Fortunately, we have a specimen of Bacon's poetry for 
which we need not apologize. This is also a translation, 
but, being in the precincts of profane hterature, it justified 
a freer hand. We give it entire, as follows : 

" The world's a bubble, and the life of man 

Less than a span; 
In his conception wretched, from the womb 

So to the tomb; 
Cursed from his cradle and brought up to years 

With cares and fears; 
Who, then, to frail mortality shall trust 
But limns the water, or but writes in dust. 

" Yet whilst with sorrow here we live oppressed. 

What life is best ? 
Courts are only superficial schools. 

To dandle fools. 
The rural parts are turned into a den 

Of savage men; 
And Where's the city from foul vice so free 
But may be termed the worst of all the three? 



74 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

" Domestic cares afflict the husband's bed, 

Or pain his head. 
Those that live single take it for a curse, 

Or do things worse. 
Some would have children; those that have them moan, 

Or wish them gone. 
What is it, then, to have or have no wife, 
But single thralldom, or a double strife? 

" Our own affections still at home to please 

Is a disease; 
To cross the seas to anj^ foreign soil, 

Perils and toil. 
Wars with their noise affright us; when they cease, 

We're worse in peace. 
What then remains, but that we still should cry 
Not to be born, or, being born, to die?" 

It is not known when the above was written. We find 
it for the first time in a volume of Greek epigrams, pub- 
hshed in 1629, three years after Bacon's death. All that 
is claimed for it is a high degree of skill in versification, the 
opportunity not admitting a flight of genius. The original 
is a dull, placid stream flowing through a meadow, not a 
cataract from a mountain height. 

To know Bacon as a " concealed poet," we must study 
his prose. The critics, before the shadow of this con- 
troversy fell upon them, thus described it : 



BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. 75 

"In this band of scholars, dreamers, and inquirers appears 
the most comprehensive, sensitive, originative of the minds of 
the age, Francis Bacon; a great and luminous intellect, one of 
the finest of this poetic progeny." — Taine. 

" Like the poets, he peoples nature with instincts and desires; 
attributes to bodies an actual voracity; to the atmosphere, a thirst 
for light, sounds, odors, vapors, whicli it drinks in; to metals, a 
sort of haste to be incorporated with acids." — Idem, 

" In his style there is the same quality which is applauded in 
Shakespeare, a combination of the intellectual and the imagina- 
tive, the closest reasoning in the boldest metaphor." — Shaw. 

"The utmost splendor of imagery." — Mackintosh. 

" Like unto Shakespeare, he takes good note of anj^ deficiency 
of S)ilabic pulsations, and imparts the value of but one syl- 
lable to the disS3dlables heaven, many, even, goeth; and to glit- 
fering and chariot but the value of two, precisely as Shakespeare 
would." — Prof. J. IV, Tavener. 

"The style is quaint, original, abounding in allusions and 
witticisms, and rich, even to gorgeousness, with piled-up analo- 
gies and metaphors." — Encyc. Brit. 

"It is as an inspired seer, the prose-poet of modern science, 
that I reverence Lord Bacon." — Sir Alexander Grant. 

"Lord Bacon was a poet. His language has a sweet and 
majestic rhythm which satisfies the sense, no less than the almost 
superhuman wisdom of his philosophy satisfies the intellect. It is 
a strain which distends and then bursts the circumference of the 
reader's mind, and pours itself forth with it into the universal 
element with which it has perpetual sympathy. 

" Plato exhibits the rare union of close and subtle logic with 



Y6 bacon vs. SHAKESPEARE. 

the Pythian enthusiasm of poetry, melted by the splendor and 
harmony of his periods, which hurry the persuasions onward as 
in a breathless career. His language is that of an immortal 
spirit rather than a man. Lord Bacon is perhaps the only writer 
who in these particulars can be compared with him."* — Shelley. 

"No man ever had an imagination at once so strong and so 
thoroughly subjugated. In truth, much of Bacon's life was 
passed in a visionary world, amidst things as strange as any that 
are described in the Arabian Tales." — Macaulay. 

" He seems to have written his essays with the pen of Shake- 
speare." — Alexander Smith. 

It is admitted, then, that Bacon was at least a prose- 
poet. No man ever caught more quickly or aptly the re- 
semblances of things or had a finer ear for the melody of 
speech. His metaphors trooped, as it were, to the sound 
of music. Professor Tavener compares his cadences to 
the swinging of a pendulum beating seconds. We know 
he was abnormally sensitive to the moods of nature, for he 
had fainting spells at every eclipse of the moon. We know 
he had a passion for the drama, shown by the part he took 
in devising stage performances before the court and in the 

* Our attention was called to this remarkable testimony of the poet Shelley 
by Mr. R. M. Theobald, who makes the following comment: "The truth is, 
that while the critics have their eye on the Baconian theory, they call Bacon 
prosy, unimaginative, and incapable of poetry. When they sincerely describe 
him, they one and all assign to him Shakespearean attributes ; so that if you 
cull the eulogies passed on Bacon, you have a portrait of the author of Shake- 
speare." 



BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. 



77 



revels at Gray's Inn. We know, also, he had an inexhaust- 
ible fund of humor, that poured from his tongue with the 
ripple of laughing waters, and needed only the constraints 
of a written dialogue to tumble and foam. 

These considerations, however, leave still a wide chasm 
between Bacon's prose and the Shakespeare poetry. The 
two sets of works seem at first sight to differ, not in degree 
only, but in kind. They are, indeed, as unlike as the 
caterpillar and the butterfly, one walking the earth and the 
other mounting on wings into the air. And yet, it is 
diversity of conditions, rather than that of personal types, 
that impresses us in them. They imply two states of exist- 
ence, not incompatible in one person. Goethe's fine instinct 
suspected depths of meaning, unknown in his calmer mo- 
ments to himself, in the second part of Faust. Natural 
orators have sometimes wondered, in the midst of their 
highest flights, what strange power had taken possession of 
their mental faculties. St. Peter protested on the day of 
Pentecost that he was not drunken with wine, though the 
same exaltation of spirit gave Spinoza the title of " God- 
intoxicated." 

Here, then, are two spheres in which every human soul, 
divinely gifted, may have a dual being. In the higher, 
destined perhaps to be the ultimate for all, we find the 
seers of our race. Xo Kepler has yet discovered the laws 



•yS BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

of their celestial orbits, but Plato and Emerson, Beethoven 
and Angelo, Dante and Goethe, give us some knowledge 
of their mighty sweep. We may wait centuries before a 
plummet, like Bessel's, dropped into these depths, shall 
strike bottom. 

Of men eminent at once in both, Milton, Goethe, and 
Poe are conspicuous examples. Milton's Areopagitica is 
a " cloth of gold," worthy of the author of Paradise Lost, 
or better still, according to some critics, of Paradise Re- 
gained. Goethe's mind worked analytically or synthetically 
with equal power. He could detect a vertebra in the 
formation of a skull as readily as he could compress, into 
the experiences of one man subject to the personal guid- 
ance of Satan, the history of the human race. Poe's lyric 
genius was the greatest America ever produced, but it did 
not prevent him from giving us, in feats of analytical 
legerdemain, most extraordinary and enduring effects in 
prose. 

The question arises, was Bacon also one of these rare 
spirits f To determine it, why not bring him to the test 
of the rule of three ? Why indulge in vague generalities, 
however learned or briUiant, when standards of comparison 
are within reach ? One commentator, for instance, sets the 
"dry light of intellect" in Bacon over against the "warm 
sunshine " of Shakespeare ; another sees radical differences 



BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. 79 

between the two minds, the powers of one being analytical 
and the powers of the other synthetical. Let us apply 
these theories mathematically, taking two of the three 
known terms of our proportion from Milton, The ratios 
may be stated thus : 

Milton's prose : Paradise Lost : : Bacon's prose : Hamlet. 

For comparison, we select, in each instance, the finest 
passage the genius of the author affords, as follows : 

Milton. — " Books are not absolutely dead things, but do con- 
tain a potency of life in them, to be as active as that 
soul whose progeny they are ; nay, they do preserve, as 
in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of that living 
intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively and 
as vigorously productive as those fabulous dragons' 
teeth ; and, being sown up and down, may chance to 
spring up armed men. And yet, on the other hand, 
unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as 
kill a good book : who kills a man kills a reasonable 
• creature — God's image ; but he who destroys a good 
book kills reason itself — kills the image of God, as it 
were, in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to 
the earth ; but a good book is the precious life-blood of 
a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose 
to a life be3-ond life." — Areopagitica. 

"Thus far these, be3ond 
Compare of mortal prowess, yet observed 



8o BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

Their great commander; he, above the rest 

In shape and gesture proudlj' eminent, 

Stood like a tower; his form had not 3'et lost 

All her original brightness, nor appear'd 

Less than archangel ruin'd, and the excess 

Of glory obscured; as when the sun, new-risen. 

Looks through the horizontal misty air 

Shorn of his beams; or from behind the moon, 

In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds 

On half the nations, and with fear of change 

Perplexes monarchs. Darken'd so, yet shone 

Above them all the Arch-angel; but his face 

Deep scars of thunder had intrench'd, and care 

Sat on his faded cheek; but under brows 

Of dauntless courage and considerate pride, 

Waiting revenge." Paradise Lost. 

Bacon. — " Prosperity is the blessing of the Old Testament ; 
adversity is the blessing of the New, which carrieth the 
greater benediction, and the clearer revelation of God's 
favor. Yet even in the Old Testament, if you listen to 
David's harp, you shall hear as many hearse-like airs as 
carols ; and the pencil of the Holy Ghost hath labored 
more in describing the afflictions of Job than the felici- 
ties of Solomon. Prosperity is not without many fears 
and distastes ; and adversity is not without comforts 
and hopes. We see in needleworks and embroideries, 
it is more pleasing to have a lively work upon a sad 
and solemn ground, than to have a dark and melan- 
choly work upon a lightsome ground : judge, therefore, 



BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. 51 

of the pleasure of the heart b)^ the pleasure of the eye. 
Certainly virtue is like precious odors, most fragrant 
when they are incensed or crushed : for prosperity doth 
best discover vice ; but adversity doth best discover 
virtue." — Essay of Adversity. 

To be, or not to be: that is the question; 
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer 
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, 
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, 
And b)' opposing end them? To die: to sleep; 
No more; and by a sleep to sa}' we end 
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks 
That flesh is heir to; 'tis a consummation 
Devoutl}' to be wish'd. To die, to sleep; 
To sleep: perchance to dream; ay, there's the rub; 
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come 
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, 
Must give us pause: there's the respect 
That makes calamity of so long life; 
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time. 
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumel)^ 
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay. 
The insolence of office, and the spurns 
That patient merit of the unworthy takes, 
******* 
But that the dread of something after death. 
The undiscovered country from whose bourn 
No traveler returns, puzzles the will 
And makes us rather bear the ills we have 
6 



82 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

Than fly to others that we know not of ? 

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; 

And thus the native hue of resolution 

Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, 

And enterprises of great pith and moment 

With this regard their currents turn awry, 

And lose the name of action." Hamlet. 

Here is a nice literary problem. In Milton, we have an 
eloquent eulogy of good books, and, following this, the 
grandest, most terrible figure the eye of imagination ever 
beheld. Boldness, originality, sublimity characterize both. 
The image of God shining upon us through the clear light 
of knowledge, and that of the ruined archangel like the sun 
seen through a mist, are metaphors so striking and at the 
same time so similar that under any circumstances, it would 
seem, we might have suspected their common origin. Cer- 
tainly the two specimens are pitched in the same lofty key. 

Turning to the couplet from Bacon, what do we find f 
An intellect of a wholly different type, at once incisive and 
profound, grasping principles as firmly as Jupiter grasped 
thunder-bolts, and wielding them with a brilliancy that is 
almost dazzling. The two passages, from the Essay and 
from Hamlet, illustrate almost precisely the same mental 
qualities. They are both philosophical. They deal analyt- 
ically, one with the joys and sorrows of this world, and 
the other with doubts and misgivings on the perilous 
edge of the next. There is no spiritual rift, and conse- 



BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. 83 

quently no " warm sunshine " pouring down through the 
clouds, in either. 

"The truth is that Bacon was not without the fine frenzy of the 
poet." — Spedding. 

7. Bacon's ivant of natural sympathy, as shown in his 
treatment of Essex, fails to satisfy our ideal, derived from the 
dramas themselves, of their great author; for the world has 
bestowed tipon Shakespeare not only its reverence, hut its love. 

It cannot be denied that the author of the Plays possessed 
a heart of the most tender sensibilities. Like the tides of 
the ocean, his sympathies were " poured round all," pene- 
trating every bay, creek, and river of human experience. 
The voyager o'er the mighty current of his thought always 
feels embarked on the bosom of the unbounded deep. It 
is not enough, therefore, that Bacon was a man of lofty 
aims ; that he devoted his great powers with tireless as- 
siduity to the interests of mankind ; was he also of that 
rare type of character that, with greatness of intellect, 
glows and scintillates at every touch of feeling? 

This brings us to a most important test, the personality 
of Lord Bacon himself. Time has scarcely dimmed his 
figure ; we know him almost as intimately as though he 
were walking oiu- streets. We see him gathering violets 
in his garden, stringing pearls of thought in his essays, 
swaying the House of Commons with his eloquence, hold- 
ing the scales of justice in the courts, marking the trend of 



84 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

social progress in his histories, and breaking the chains that 
had bound the human intellect from the days of Aristotle. 
His mind and heart were in touch with every interest of 
mankind. He was poet, orator, naturalist, physician, his- 
torian, essayist, philosopher, statesman, and judge. No 
man ever filled more completely the ideal of the Roman poet : 

"■Homo sum ; huiitaiii nihil a me alicmun puto." 

''The small, fine mind of Labruyere had not a more delicate 
tact than the large intellect of Bacon. His understanding resem- 
bled the tent which the fairy Parabanon gave to Prince Ahmed. 
Fold it, and it seemed a toy in the hand of a lady ; spread it, and 
the armies of powerful sultans might repose beneath its shade." — 
Macaulay. 

" A soft voice, a laughing lip, a melting heart, made him hosts 
of friends. No child could resist the spell of his sweet speech, of 
his tender smile, of his grace without study, his frankness with- 
out guile." — Hep-toorth Dixon. 

He is accused of ingratitude toward his friend Essex, 
because, first, he appeared against the accused at the trial ; 
and, secondly, because by superior tactics he was the means 
of insuring conviction. 

On the first point, it is sufficient to say that Bacon was 
present as an officer of the crown at the express command 
of the Queen, having repeatedly forewarned the Earl of 
the result of his evil courses, and duly notified him that, 



BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. 85 

on any breach of the peace, he himself would support the 
government. On the second, he was prominent in the 
proceedings because his mental stature made him promi- 
nent. As well attempt to force an oak back into its acorn 
as to bring Francis Bacon on any occasion down to the 
level of ordinary men.* 

In the matter of the bribes, he suffered for the sins of 
society. So far as he was personally culpable, it is manifest 
from his subsequent demeanor that chronic carelessness in 
money matters, and not any guile, was at the bottom of 
the difficulty.t 

* That Bacon felt himself compromised in public estimation we know very- 
well, for in a letter to the Queen he says: 

" My life has been threatened and my name libeled." 
We find the same lament in one of his sonnets, as follows : 
" Then hate me if thou will; if ever, now, 
Now while the world is bent my deeds to cross, 
Join with the spite of fortune." Sonnet XC. 

In another sonnet, the author expresses fear of assassination, anticipating 
" The coward conquest of a wretch's knife." LXX. 

t Bacon's want of attention to his personal finances (a not uncommon 
failing in great men, due to a sort of instinct that the matter is beneath them) 
caused his mother the most lively concern. She even interfered at one time to 
protect him from his own servants. Spedding tells the following story in 
point : 

" In the year 1655, a book-seller's boy heard some gentlemen talking in his 
master's shop; oneof them, a gray -headed man, wasdescribing a scene which he 
had himself witnessed at Gorhambury. He had gone to see the lord chancel- 
lor on business, who received him in his study and, having occasion to go out, 



86 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

" No one mistook the condemnation for a moral censure; no 
one treated Lord St. Albans as a convicted judge. The House 
of Commons had refused to adopt the charge of bribery; the 
House of Lords had rejected the attempt to brand him with a 
personal shame; and society treated the event as one of those 
struggles for place which may hurt a man's fortunes without 
hurting his fame. The most noble and most generous men, the 
best scholars, the most pious clergymen, gathered round him in 
his adversity, more loving, more observant, more reverential, 
than they had ever been in his days of splendor. 

" Such was also the reading of these transactions by the most 
eminent of foreign ministers and travelers. The French Marquis 



left him there for awhile alone. ' Whilst his lordship was gone, there comes,' 
he said, 'into tVie study one of his lordship's gentlemen, and opens my lord's 
chest of drawers wherein his money was, takes it out in handfuls, fills his 
pockets, and goes away without saying a word to me. He was no sooner gone 
but comes another gentleman, opens the same drawers, fills both his pockets with 
money, and goes away as the former did, without speaking a word.' • Bacon, 
being told when he came back what had passed in his absence, merely shook 
his head, and all he said was, 'Sir, 1 cannot help myself.'" 

Montagu relates another incident to the same effect : 

One day, immediately after Bacon's removal from the chancellorship, he 
happened to enter his servants' hall while they were at dinner. On their rising 
(about one hundred in number) to receive him, he said : '• Be seated; your 
rise has been my fall." 

" His principal fault seems to have been the excess of that virtue which cov- 
ers a multitude of sins. This betrayed him to so great an indulgence toward 
his servants, who made a corrupt use of it, that it stripped him of all those 
riches and honors which a long series of merits had heaped upon him."— AMi- 
son. 

" Bacon was generous, easy, good natured, and naturally just ; but he had 
the misfortune to be beset by domestic harpies who, in a manner, farmed out 
his office."— Guthrie. 



BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. 87 

d'Effiat, the Spanish Conde de Gondomar, expressed for him in 
his fallen fortunes the most exalted veneration. That the judges 
on the bench, that the members of both Houses of Parliament, 
even those who, at Buckingham's bidding, had passed against 
him that abominable sentence, concurred with the most eminent 
of their contemporaries, native and alien, is apparent in the 
failure of every attempt made to disturb his judicial decisions. 
These efforts failed because there was no injustice to overthrow, 
and there was no injustice to overthrow because there had been 
no corruption on the bench." — Dixon. 

History presents to us no more pathetic figure than that 
of the great Lord Bacon beseeching in vain that he might 
not be compelled to close his career— a career of unex- 
ampled usefulness to the world — in ignominy. The author- 
ities that condemned him remind us of a pack of wolves, 
turning upon and rending a wounded comrade. 



V. 

Let us now examine the internal evidences, presented in 
the Plays themselves, of Bacon's authorship. 

a. A prominent characteristic of Bacon in his hterary 
work was the frequency with which he invented new words. 
It is safe to say that no other writer, with possibly one 
exception, ever did so much to diversify and enrich our 
Enghsh tongue. We find many of these words actually 
taking shape before our eyes in the Promus, perhaps a bright 
nucleus from the Latin in a nebulous envelope of pre- 
fixes and suffixes, preparing to shine forever, with a radiance 
of its own, in human speech. 

In this business of word-building, however. Bacon had a 
strange double. It is estimated that Shakespeare gave 
five thousand new words, inclusive of old words with new 
meanings, to our language. And these additions were also, 
like Bacon's, derived chiefly from the Latin. They were 
such as only a scholar could impose upon the king's ver- 
nacular.* 

* Hallam calls attention to Shakespeare's fondness for words in their 
primitive meanings. He sees a student's instinct in this attempt, contrary in 



BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. 89 

/;. Bacon had also a wonderful variety at his command 
in manner of writing. In this respect, he was a literary 
chameleon. Abbott says of him : 

" His stj'le varied almost as much as his handwriting; but it 
was influenced more by the subject matter than by youth or old 
age. Few men have shown equal versatility in adapting their 
language to the slightest change of circumstance and purpose. 
His style depended upon whether he was addressing a king, or a 
great nobleman, or a philosopher, or a friend ; whether he was 
composing a state paper, magnifying the prerogative, extolling 
truth, discussing studies, exhorting a judge, sending a New 
Year's present, or sounding a trumpet to prepare the way for the 
kingdom of man over nature." 

It does not follow, of course, that because he had this 
" wonderful ductihty," as Hallam calls it, therefore he 
wrote the Plays. The conver.se of the proposition, how- 
ever, is worth noting, viz. : without it, he would have been 
disqualified for the task. 

c. Again, Bacon was constantly making alterations in 
his writings, even after they had gone to press. Of the 
ten essays which he published in 1597, nearly all were more 

many cases to popular usage, to keep our language true to its Latin roots. The 
following are a few examples : " Things base and vile, holding no quatitity " 
(for value) ; " rivers, that have overborn their coniitieuis " (the continente ripa 
of Horace); " imagination all <roOT/rtrf " ; "something of great (ro«^/'rt«o'" (for 
consistency) ; " sweet Pyramus translated there " ; " the law of Athens, which 
by no means we may extenuate.''^ 



9° 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 



or less changed and enlarged for the edition of 1612. 
Those of 161 2, including the ten before mentioned, were 
again enlarged for publication in 1625. It seems to have 
been almost impossible for an essay to get to the types a 
second time without passing through his reforming hand, 
in one instance actually losing identity in the transition. 

This was precisely the fate of the Plays. Some of them 
underwent complete transformation between the quartos 
and the foho, becoming practically new compositions, and, 
what is very singular, working away from the requirements 
of the stage into forms more purely artistic and literary. 

If there were two workshops, it is certain that one set 
of rules governed both. 

d. Bacon's sense of humor, as has already been shown, 
was phenomenal, and yet it had one curb which it always 
obeyed. In his Essay of Discourse, he lays down the rule, 
among others, that religion should never be the butt of a 
jest. Accordingly, it is impossible to find, in all the wild, 
rollicking fun of the Plays, even a flippancy at the expense 
of the Church. 

c. Bacon was very fond of puns. He not only handed 
down to posterity numerous specimens found in his reading, 
but he immortahzed some of his own in the Apothegms. 
The Spanish Ambassador, a Jew, happening to leave Eng- 
land Easter morning, paid his parting respects to Bacon, 



BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. 



91 



wishing him a good Easter. Bacon replied, wishing his 
friend a good pass-over. The Plays also abound in this 
species of wit. A remarkable instance may be quoted from 
the Merry Wives of Windsor, thus : 

" Evans : Accusaiivo, king, hatig, hog. 
Quick : Hang hog is Latin for bacon, I warrant you." 

Act iv., I. 

This refers to a pun perpetrated by Sir Nicholas Bacon, 
father of Francis. One day a culprit, named Hog, appealed 
to Judge Bacon's mercy on the ground that they were of 
the same family. " Aye," rephed the Judge, " you and I 
cannot be kindred except you be hanged ; for hog is not 
bacon until it be well hanged." 

The appearance of this family pun in the Plays is 
significant. 

/. Bacon's prose works overflow with citations from 
classical bterature. They are filled to saturation with 
ancient lore. This is true also of the Plays. They make 
us breathe the very air of Greece and Rome. The follow- 
ing is only a partial list of the classical authors, the in- 
fluence of whose writings has been traced in them : Homer, 
Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Euripides, ^schylus, Lucian, 
Galen, Ovid, Lucretius, Tacitus, Horace, Virgil, Plutarch, 
Seneca, Catullus, Livy, and Plautus, all of whom were 
known to Bacon. A curious instance is the following : 



92 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 



" Thy promises are like Adonis' gardens, 
That one day bloomed and fruitful were the next." 

Fiist Henry VI., i., 6. 

This reference puzzled all the commentators for nearly 
three hundred years, Richard Grant White declaring that 
" no mention of any such gardens in the classic writings of 
Greece or Rome is known to scholars.'' It has recently 
been found, however, in Plato's Phcedrus, a work that 
had not been translated into English in Shakespeare's 
time. 

"It is the ease and naturalness with which the classical al- 
lusions are introduced to which it is the most important that we 
should attend. The)' are not purple patches sewed on to a piece 
of plain homespun ; they are inwoven in the web." 

" He [Farmer] leaves us at full liberty, for anything he has ad- 
vanced, to regard Shakespeare as having had a mind richly 
furnished with the mythology and history of the times of an- 
tiquity, an intimate and inwrought acquaintance, such as perhaps 
few profound scholars possess." — Hunter. 

g. Bacon's paramount aspiration was to possess and im- 
part wisdom. He was indefatigable in his search for it, 
analyzing motives and turning the light of his genius upon 
the most hidden springs of conduct. Nothing was too re- 
mote or recondite for his use. It was inevitable, then, that 
his mind should fall easily and naturally into those chan- 
nels of thought which the " wit of one and the wisdom of 



BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. 93 

many " have worn deep in human experience. The Promus 
fairly sparkles with proverbs. Nearly every known lan- 
guage appears to have been ransacked for them. From 
the Promus they were poured copiously into the Plays. 
Mrs. Pott finds nearly two thousand instances in which they 
beautify and enrich these wonderful works. 

" In Bacon's works we find a multitude of moral sayings and 
maxims of experience, from whicli tlie most striking mottoes 
might be drawn for every play of Shakespeare, aye, for everj^ one 
of his principal characters . . testifying to a remarkable har- 
mony in their mutual comprehension of human nature." — Gervinus. 

h. Bacon's whole life was passed in the atmosphere of 
the court. At the age of ten, he was patted on the head 
by Queen Elizabeth and called her " young lord keeper." 
When sixteen, he went to Paris in the suite of the British 
Ambassador, and lived three years in that gay capital and 
its vicinity, studying not only the arts of diplomacy, but all 
the penetralia of court life. On his return he was freely 
admitted to the presence of royalty, was the friend of 
princes, and, fiUing the highest offices in the gift of the 
King, was elevated to the peerage. It is not surprising, 
therefore, that the Plays, almost without exception, have 
their movement in the highest circles of society. The 
common people are kept in the background, and are re- 
ferred to in terms, often bordering on contempt, that show 
the author not to be one of them. 



94 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE, 

" Shakespeare despised the million, and Bacon feared with 
Phocion the applause of the multitude." — Gervinus. 

i. Bacon was continually hiding his personality under 
disguises. One of the first acts of his pubhc career was to 
invent a cipher for letter-writing. He even invented a 
cipher within a cipher, so that, if the first should by any 
chance be disclosed, the other, imbedded in it, would 
escape detection. At one time, he carried on a fictitious 
correspondence, intended for the eye of the Queen, be- 
tween his brother Anthony and the Earl of Essex, com- 
posing the letters on both sides and referring to himself in 
the third person. He published one of his philosophical 
works under a pseudonym, and another, as though it 
were the wisdom of the ancients stored in fables. Ben 
Jonson, in a poem addressed to Bacon on one of his 

birthdays, says: 

" In the midst 

Thou stand'st as though a m3'stery thou didst." 

j. Early in life, Bacon determined to make all knowledge 
his province. He became fired with this ambition at col- 
lege, when he discovered that the authority of Aristotle, 
then supreme over the minds of men, was based on erro- 
neous postulates. Accordingly, he resolved, single-handed, 
to demolish the whole structure of philosophy as it then 
existed, and to rebuild it upon foundations laid by himself. 



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95 



To accomplish this, he knew he must compass all the 
knowledge of his time, as the great Stagirite had done be- 
fore him. How well and faithfully he fulfilled his task, 
let the gratitude and veneration of mankind make answer. 
Among the names of the five most illustrious men of all the 
world, Bacon's has a place, and that place at or near the 
head. 

Of the various arts and sciences into which he pushed 
his investigations, we may specify the following : 
Philosophy. — Bacon has been called the father of induct- 
ive philosophy, because he, more than any other, 
taught the natural method of searching for truth. 
Before his time, men had conceived certain prin- 
ciples to be true, and from them had reasoned down 
to facts. The consequence was that facts became 
more or less warped to fit theories, and the discov- 
ery of new facts, out of harmony with the theories, 
a matter of regret, and even of condemnation. 
Under this system, obviously, the world could make 
but slow progress. 

Bacon started at the other end. He hitched his 
wagon not to a star, but to nature. He taught 
men to reason upward, and, if he did not himself 
soar into the empyrean, it was because the work of 
collating what is known must always precede those 



gS BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

great generalizations which are the final object of 
human thought. 

It is in this domain of practical experience that 
we find the secret of the immortality of the Plays. 
They illustrate the same kind of philosophy that 
Bacon expounded in his prose works. How un- 
erring the instinct with which the dramatist analyzes 
the human heart ! In both authors, analysis pre- 
cedes synthesis, as the foundations of the temple 
must be laid before the dome can spring into the 
sky. 

" A similar combination of different mental powers was 
at work in them ; as Shakespeare was often philosophical 
in his profoundness. Bacon was not seldom surprised into 
the imagination of the poet." — Gervimis. 

Bacon's contempt for his predecessors in this 
branch of learning is well reflected in the Plays. 
Note the following : 

"There was never yet philosopher 
That could endure the tooth-ache patiently." 

Much Ado about A'o thing, v., i. 
" I am not mad I would to heaven 1 were ; 
For then 'tis like I should forget myself; 
O, if I could, what grief should I forget ! — 
Preach some philosophy to make me mad." 

King John, iii.,4. 



BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. 97 

Sir Hugh Evans, in the Merry Wives of Windsor, con- 
tends that lips are a part of the mouth, and claims to be 
supported in that view b}' "divers philosophers." 

Into what a terrible abyss does the stream of philos- 
ophy plunge in the only play located at Athens ! 

History. — Historical literature had a special charm for 
Bacon. His history of the reign of Henry VII. is 
an English classic ; his portraiture of Julius Caesar, 
an epitome of one of the world's most interesting 
and important epochs. 

Shakespeare's mind ran in the same channels. 
Nearly half the Plays are historical. And they deal 
with those periods to which Bacon gave particular 
attention, the English Henries and the career of 
Rome. 

" ' Where have you learned the history of England ?' it 
was asked of the greatest statesman of the last centur3^ 
Lord Chatham replied : ' In the plays of Shakespeare.' " — 
Dean Stanley. 

"The marvelous accuracy, the real, substantial learn- 
ing of the three Roman plays of Shakespeare, present the 
most complete evidence to our minds that the)' were the 
result of a profound study of the whole range of Roman 
history. " — Knight. 

Law. — Bacon began the study of law at nineteen, several 
years before the appearance of the first of the 



gS BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

Shakespeare Plays. His mastery of the subject 
was prompt and thorough. At fifty, he was the 
leading jurist of the age. 

The use of legal terms in the Plays, always in 
their exact significance, and sometimes showing 
profound insight into the principles on which they 
rest, has long excited the wonder of the world. On 
this point we have already given the opinion of 
Chief Justice Campbell ; we will add the testimony 
of Richard Grant White, a witness on the other 
side, and now speaking, as it were, under cross- 
examination, as follows : 

" No dramatist of the time, not even Beaumont, who 
was a 3'ounger son of a judge of the Common Pleas, and 
who, after stud3'ing in tlie inns of court, abandoned law 
for the drama, used legal phrases with Shakespeare's 
readiness and exactness. And the significance of this 
fact is heightened by another, that it is onl}' to the lan- 
guage of the law that he exhibits this inclination. The 
phrases peculiar to other occupations serve him on rare 
occasions, generally when something in the scene sug- 
gests them ; but legal phrases flow from his pen as part 
of his vocabular}' and parcel of his thought. . . . And 
besides, Shakespeare uses his law just as freely in his 
early plays, written in his first London years, as in those 
produced at a later period. Just as exactly, too ; for the 
correctness and propriety with which these terms are in- 



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99 



troduced have compelled the admiration of a chief justice 
and a lord chancellor." 

The conclusion is well-nigh irresistible that a 
trained lawyer was the author of the Plays. The 
only possible escape from it is through Portia's 
unprecedented rulings in the trial scene in Mer- 
chant of Venice ; as though a beautiful damsel, 
sitting as judge on the bench, and in love with one 
of the parties interested in the suit, were expected 
to follow legal precedents ! We shall next be told 
that the delicious absurdities of Pinafore came from 
one ignorant of discipline on a man-of-war. " My 
gallant crew, good-morning," says Captain Cor- 
coran, boarding his ship. " Good-morning, sir," is 
the cheery reply from all hands. What dunces 
Gilbert and Sullivan must be ! 
Mediciue. — Upon the theory and practice of medicine, 
Bacon lavished, at times, all his powers. The study 
seems to have had a special fascination for him. 
He was puddering in physic, he says, all his life. 
He even kept an apothecary among his personal 
retainers, seldom retiring to bed without a dose. 

Physicians tell us that the writer of the Plays was 
a medical expert. Dr. Bucknill has written a book 
of three hundred pages, and Dr. Chesney one of 



lOO BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

two hundred, to prove this. We know that the 
names of Galen and Paracelsus roll from the 
tongues of the dramatis personam like household 
words. Bacon's mother was afflicted, in the latter 
part of her life, with insanity. The portrayal of 
that dreaded disease in Hamlet and King Lear is 
to this day a psychological marvel. 

"We confess, almost with shame, that although nearly 
two centuries and a half have passed since Shakespeare 
wrote King Lear, we have ver}' little to add to his method 
of treating the insane, as there pointed out." — Dr. 
Brighain. 

Natural History. — No department of science was more 
thoroughly explored by Bacon than natural history. 
If he had anticipated a general deluge of ignorance, 
he could not have gathered into an ark a more 
complete menagerie than the one we find in his 
Silva Silvarum. Nearly every living species in the 
four- quarters of the earth is represented there. 

In one other author alone, not professedly tech- 
nical, do we find equally accurate and copious 
references to animals and plants. That author is 
Shakespeare. The books that have been written to 
show his knowledge on this subject constitute a 
small library. We have one by Harting on the 



HRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. lOI 

Ornithology of Shakespeare ; another by Phipson 
on his Animal Lore ; three by Ellacombe, Beisly, 
and Grindon on his Plant Lore ; and an elaborate 
treatise by Patterson on the Insects mentioned in 
the Plays. 

Religion. — The Bacon family was Catholic under Mary 
and Protestant under Elizabeth. As a conse- 
quence, Francis had no strong predilections in favor 
of either sect. In religion as in philosophy, he 
abhorred sects and sought only what was universal. 
The sincerity of his faith in an over-ruling Provi- 
dence we have no reason to doubt, though his own 
statement, that " a little philosophy inchneth man's 
mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth 
men's minds about to religion," may have been, 
intentionally or unintentionally, autobiographical, 
indicating some laxity of opinions on this subject 
in the early part of his life. The anxieties and con- 
stant admonitions of his mother, culminating in the 
dethronement of her reason, as well as the subse- 
quent battles of religious controversialists over his 
status, would seem to justify this inference. 

" He was in power at the time of the Synod of Dort, 
and must for months have been deafened with talk about 
election, reprobation and final perseverance. Yet we do 



BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

not remember a line in his works from which it can be 
mferred that he was either a Calvinist or an Arminian." 

— Macatilay. 

Shakespeare's religion was also an anomaly. 
Several books have been written on it, but they 
might have been compressed into the dimensions of 
Horrebow's famous chapter on snakes in Iceland. 
Some infer, from his toleration amid the fierce re- 
sentments of his time, that he was a Catholic ; 
others, from the defiance hurled at the Pope in 
King John and from the panegyric on Cranmer in 
Henry VIII., that he was a Protestant ; while 
others still, finding no consolations from belief in 
a future life in the Plays, proclaim him an infidel. 
Indeed, pious commentators always approach this 
subject walking backward and holding a mantle 
before them. They know instinctively that the 
great poet was also a great philosopher, building 
solidly on human reason, and from the summit of 
his magnificent structures allowing not even a vine 
to shoot upward. 

" No church can claim him." — Richard Grant White. 

" Both have an equal hatred of sects and parties : 
Bacon, of sophists and dogmatic philosophers ; Shake- 



BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. 1 03 

speare, of Puritans and zealots. . . . Just as Bacon ban- 
ished religion from science, so did Shakespeare from art. 
... In both, this has been equally misconstrued, Le 
Maistre proving Bacon's lack of Christianity, as Birch has 
done that of Shakespeare." — Gei~<jinus. 

Music. — Both authors took great deUght in music. Bacon 
devoted a long chapter of his Natural History 
to the consideration of sounds and the laws of 
melody. In the Plays, we find nothing sweeter 
than the strains that " creep in our ears " as we 
read them. 

" Shakespeare seems to have been proficient in the 
art." — Richard Grant White, 

" He seems also to have possessed, in an unusual 
, degree, the power of judging and understanding the 
theory of music, that upon which the performance and 
execution of music depends. In the Ttoo Gentlemen of 
Vera)ia (i. i), where the heroine of the play is conversing 
with her maid, there is a passage which enters so full}' 
into the manner of how a song should be sung, that it 
seems to have been inserted intentionally to exhibit the 
young poet's knowledge in this branch of art. And 
Burney draws attention to the fact that the critic, who, in 
the scene referred to, is teaching Lucetta Julia's song, 
makes use of no expressions but such as were employed 
by the English as termini technici in the profession of 
music." — Ulrici. 



I04 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

Oratory. — Bacon was a natural orator. Ben Jonson says 
of him : 

"There happened in my time one noble speaker, who 
was full of gravity in his speaking. . . . His hearers could 
not cough or look aside from him without loss. He com- 
manded where he spoke, and had his judges angry and 
pleased at his will. No man had their affections more in 
his power. The fear of every man who heard him was, 
lest he should make an end." 

Another contemporary pronounced him " the elo- 
quentest man that was born in this island." 

Turning to the Plays, we find there the most won- 
derful speech that ever passed, or was supposed to 
pass, human lips. In power of sarcasm, in pathos, 
in subhmity of utterance, and, above all, in rhetor- 
ical subtlety, Mark Antony's oration over the body 
of Caesar has no equal in forensic literature. 

" Every line of this speech deserves an eulogium ; . . . 
neither Demosthenes, nor Cicero, nor their glorious rival, 
the immortal Chatham, ever made a better." — Sherlock. 

Printing. — Bacon's knowledge of the printer's art extended 
to the minutest details. His first book was pub- 
lished when he was twenty-four, but under so 
heavy a title, TJic Greatest Birth of Time, that it 
sank at once into the sea of oblivion. The mvs- 



BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. 1 05 

teries of the craft, however, became finally very 
familiar to him. In the N'ovum Orgajium he an- 
nounced his intention of writing a treatise on the 
subject, going so far as to include ink, pens, paper, 
parchment and seals in his prospectus for it. 

The encyclopedic Shakespeare was also at home 
in the composing and press rooms. " He could 
not have been more so," says Mr. Appleton Mor- 
gan,* " if he had passed his days as a journeyman 
printer." We have the same high authority for the 
following statement : 

"A small type, called ttonpareil, was introduced in 
English printing houses from Holland about the year 
1560, and became admired and preferred beyond the 
others in common use. It seems to have become a 
favorite with Shakespeare, who calls many of his lady 
characters 'nonpareils.'" 

Navigatmi. — Among the subjects investigated by Bacon, 
that which surprises us most to find is, perhaps, the 
. art of navigation. He went into it so thoroughly, 
however, that one of his editors feels compelled, 
by way of illustration, to give the picture of a full- 
rigged ship as a frontispiece to the book. 

We are still more astonished, or should be if we 

* President of the New York Shakespeare Society. 



I06 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

were not prepared for it, to find that Shakespeare 
had the same unusual knowledge. He not only 
" knows the ropes," but he knows exactly what to 
do on shipboard in a storm. Even the dialect of 
the forecastle is familiar to him. 

Bacon's studies, it is evident, furnished the warp and 
woof of the Plays. Unravel any of these great composi- 
tions, and you will find the same threads that are woven 
into his prose. 



VI. 

Here, then, is our Shakespeare. A man born into the 
highest culture of his time, the consummate flower of a long 
line of illustrious ancestry ; of transcendent abihties, domi- 
nated by a genius for hard work ; of aims in life, at once 
the boldest and the most inspiring which the heart of 
man ever conceived ; in originality and power of thought, 
in learning, in eloquence, in wit, and in marvelous insight 
into character, the acknowledged peer of the greatest of 
the human race. "Surely," says Holmes, "we may ex- 
claim with Coleridge, not without amazement still : ' Mer- 
ciful, wonder-making Heaven ! what a man was this 
Shakespeare ! Myriad-minded, indeed, he was.' " 

Ours is an age of disillusion. Heroes whose names 
have kindled the flame of devotion to duty in the hearts 
of millions are fading into myths. The majestic form of 
William Tell is found to be but a lengthened shadow 
thrown across the page of history. Even the faithful 
dog Gelert, over whose fate so many children have shed 
tears, has become as purely symbolic as the one that fol- 



Io8 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 

lowed Yudhishthira to the holy mount, and was thence for 
his virtues translated into heaven. Why should the world 
longer worship at the shrine of a man of whose life it 
knows, almost Hterally, in a mass of disgusting fiction, 
but one significant fact, viz. : that in his will, disposing of 
a large property, he left to the wife of his youth and the 
mother of his children nothing but his " second-best bed ! " 

The conclusion of the whole matter may be stated thus : 
The Sonnets will lose none of their sweetness, and the 
Plays none of their magnificence, by a change in the 
ascription of authorship. The world, however, will gain 
much. It will learn that effects are always commensurate 
with their causes, and that industry is the path to great- 
ness. 



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